We’ve both been ignoring the blog for a while. Every free moment for the last few weeks has been dedicated to wall packout. We are currently on the fourth of five rooms and hope to be done this layer in a few days (we are on our third layer of packout). We do have to complete a fourth layer before we can start plastering. This is because our tire placement was a bit irregular so some areas need that extra build-out to ensure a smooth wall.
We’re also re-vamping the website. Don’t worry, we’ll still provide updates and decisions about all the steps of the earthship building on our new site. That won’t change. But the look will change slightly and the content will broaden.
We felt that while we have a loyal following for the earthship progress, our lives are more than the house itself. We are also passionate about alternative fuel, alternative power, frugality, travel, living deliberately, and living debt-free.
Although we’ve blogged occasionally about these topics, both Chris and I would like to explore them further and we want to connect with others who are passionate about these areas.
We’ll continue to offer our experience, advice and thoughts on all these topics completely free, as we always have. It has always been our intent to increase the base knowledge of all the things that interest us, and as we’ve been blessed by the knowledge of others, we will continue to share as well.
We do sell an e-book on this site called “How to Build a Rocket Mass Heater”, and a set of associated plans in PDF format. We’ve been terrible at marketing it; you kind of have to mean to find it to get to the store and purchase it. Other than a youtube video and occasional mentions of the book, we haven’t made it front and centre.
Part of this is time…too much going on! Part of it is that we are not natural salespeople. Despite having a successful log home business we mainly made it that way by serving up a quality product and being grateful that satisfied customers kept recommending us.
Despite our lack of sales know-how, sales of the e-book and plans have been decent. Decent means that a year after launching it we are selling about three books or plan sets a week. Most of the feedback has been primarily praise for taking the project step by step and prividing practical detail not found elsewhere.
Our 60-page e-book encompasses all the things we discovered by researching rocket mass heaters and provides links to all the other sites and folks who’ve built one (that we know of). We also document our process and explain step by step how we built ours and why. We point out our errors, too, so that you won’t make them! We hadn’t seen this done in any one resource before and that motivated us to get a book together.
We will probably offer more e-books or other products for sale in the future. We totally underestimate how much knowledge we have stored in our brains from having simply done things that very few others have embarked upon.
But always, along the way, we will be sharing our experiences raising a family debt-free, home-schooled, green-as-we-can-be-and-getting-greener with the same honesty and humour we always have. You can continue to count on Chris’ thoughtful, and sometimes self-depracating appraisals of technical information and building arguments and I hope to begin writing again about more controversial topics like dumpster diving and unschooling.
We will always try to answer all your questions here on the blog or by email. Please continue to ask us whatever you’d really like to know! We appreciate feedback and we will continue to host free visits and tours of the earthship while it’s being built. We love to show it off and I’ve gotten over how my hair looks after 8 hours of working in the clay and cement! (If you are interested in seeing the earthship, please email us in the contact us section).
We are looking forward to our new format in the coming weeks. It should be fun as we try to fit it in with our house building schedule!
For the next few weeks for pics and vids of what we are up to right now, please visit our FB page, http://www.facebook.com/?ref=tn_tnmn#!/pages/The-Darfield-Earthship/144283802260961
Sandra