Do It Yourself Rammed Earth
Rammed Earth for the Rest of Us
Working file · Dallas, Texas · 2004 to 2012
We are Bill & Stephen Betzen, a father and son team who started the planning process in 2004 to build a rammed earth home in Dallas, Texas by 2009. We are on schedule. We want to share research we have done and make connections with similarly interested Do It Yourself (DIY) people also interested in rammed earth construction and benefits.
Our home is planned to be a 2400 sq ft, 2 story home with a covered balcony and porch surrounding the home. The ground floor earthen walls will be 2 ft thick with 18" thick walls above the second floor. The goal is a home that will be as cool as possible in the hottest Dallas summer. With a home fully surrounded by both a shaded porch and a shaded balcony, as well as many trees, we hope the worst Dallas summer sun will never heat the thermal mass of the rammed earth walls. Combined with a ventilated, reflective metal roof over insulation, we hope that annual air-conditioning needs will be greatly reduced if not totally eliminated.
Our research shows rammed earth construction to be the most simple, environmentally responsible method for building the thermal shell of a home. It will be a strong, quiet, healthy, termite-free, fire-resistant, comfortable home, one weighing 300+ tons and lasting many generations. It will save thousands of dollars annually in utility and maintenance costs along the way.
Thank you all for keeping up with our progress. The blog posts will come long after they are completed, this is partially for security of the site as well as to give us time to write the post. I would love to start right in on…
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Some of the negatives of building anything is that there is a footprint. We tried looking as many locations for the building and the one we settled on happens to cover 2 beautiful cedar trees. This location was the best location…
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Merry Christmas! There is a lot of information on the web about Rammed Earth. I am struggling with the idea of how to structure this site to be informative and easy to use. As you know we have started blogging on our Rammed earth…
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These are photos of the first rammed earth construction in Dallas. These structures are for an entryway and…
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Our Builder, Anderson Sargent, has been in communication Designer, Chris Everett. This is the first draft of the building plan. I will follow below with the changes we need made to the plan. (I know this not the the most exciting…
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On 1-14-12 I drove with a good friend to show him the rammed earth work that was already happening in Dallas. We drove to the work being done at the facility just east of the Walnut Hill Lane Dart station. As we looked over the…
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Unfortunately This project has been put on hold once again. The city shut us down... but the good part is that it had nothing to do with it being rammed earth. They stopped the project because they said we could not have another…
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Eight questions collected on the design chosen, why rammed earth stayed rare in Dallas, what changes for a Texas summer, what the work was expected to cost, and whether earth walls stand up to heavy rainfall.
/REFAQ.htm
Methods recorded during hands-on training in Tucson in the summer of 2004, and the note that no album and no book replaces training given by people who ram earth for a living.
/training.htm
The continuing-education class on energy efficient building that both of us completed in the autumn of 2005, what it covered, and why it was the best investment made in the planning stage.
/EEGBICedarValley.htm
Everything the file states about the thing itself, gathered onto one enlarged plate: the wall section as planned, the tested earth mix, and the crude cost schedule as it was written down.
| Plan area | 2,400 sq ft |
|---|---|
| Storeys | 2 |
| Ground-floor wall | 24 in |
| Second-floor wall | 18 in |
| Services in outer wall | none |
| Finished wall weight | 300+ tons |
| Roof | ventilated reflective metal over insulation |
| Sand to clay proportion | 65 / 35 |
|---|---|
| Cement added | 5 % |
| Unconfined compressive strength | just over 300 PSI |
| Material quoted | $800 |
| Trucking added | $1,500 - $2,000 |
| Earth and Portland cement | $8,000 - $15,000 |
|---|---|
| Foundation, utilities, plumbing | $15,000 - $30,000 |
| Forms, framing and equipment | $15,000 - $25,000 |
| Beams and roofing system | $20,000 - $40,000 |
| Crude total | $58,000 - $110,000 |
These are the references the original pages pointed readers at while the research was being done. They are reproduced as they were listed. The site was also a member of a rammed earth WebRing, which is how most of its readers arrived.