Quick note on my home construction project.

I am prepping the site for soil compaction inspection so I can start digging footers.

Building with earth - adobe, CEB, or rammed earth - means making a very heavy wall, so compacting the soil and digging a sufficiently deep and stable footer is extremely important to the success of the project.

Under the orange tarps are a couple of thousand CEBs that have been pressed ahead of time.

Once I build up the stem wall from the footer, I’ll mortar on two courses of CEB, then the remaining blocks will be dry stacked to the top, where the entire structure is connected with a 6 in. deep concrete bond beam- effectively sandwiching the dry stacked blocks and keeping everything stable.

The resulting structure will have tremendous thermal mass, minimizing the need for heating and cooling.

It will also have giant south-facing windows, so no, you don’t have to have tiny windows to make a green home.