How To Equip Earthbag Walls With Windows And Utility Tubes

When the walls of our new home reached nearly four feet in height, it was time to stop filling earthbags for a few days. Stucco netting was run around the lower courses of bags to protect them from destruction by the sun's UV rays, and then the window project was tackled.

Having settled on two windows in each wall, or a total of eight sliders obtained at decent prices from Home Depot, the framing and mounting process was broken down into a series of specific steps as follows:

1. Check and adjust the level where a window would be installed. In one spot, this required adding an earthbag with only two shovels worth of dirt in it. In every other case, thankfully, the mounting area was close enough to level already that a bit of extra pounding with the edge of a board was enough to even things up.

2. Using a tape measure, carpenter's square, and handsaw, cut four pieces of 2" x 12" planking, two of them three inches longer than the other two--which would then go together to form a perfectly square "box".

3. In one of the longer pieces, drill two holes for later use, using a 3/4" brace and bit...but drilling these holes only 1/4" deep (explanation shortly).

4. Fire up the big generator, grab a power drill with a 3/8" bit, and using the centers of the shallow holes as guides, drill through the board.

5. Nail the four pieces togther with 10d nails.

6. Grab a window, remove the stickers, place the window (down side down, duh) in one side of the "box", and punch plenty of pilot holes (using a 10d nail as a center punch). The windows I'd selected have a nailing fin and are meant to be applied in this fasion. How many holes are "plenty"? I go by "feel"; in this case, that worked out to 20 holes, each about 5 inches apart, for a two foot square window.

7. Drive short roofing nails in the pilot holes to secure the window.

8. Before mounting the boxed window, arrange a string--secured at the wall corners--to help with lining the window up properly with the wall. There's no such thing as a straight line in an earthbag wall, so the string serves as a necessary guide.

9. Set the boxed window where you want it, applying one brace for the moment. In this case, 2" x 4" boards in 8 foot length worked best, tacked to the window box wood with 8d nails for easy removal.

10. Drive a foot long, 3/8 thick, 100d galvanized steel spike through each of the predrilled holes in the bottom board and down into the bags themselves. Each spike penetrates two layers of bags below the board plus a bit of a third layer, which makes the box quite secure. The shallow 3/4" holes allow the heads of the spikes to be countersunk, making a smooth surface.

11. Add the second brace. The first one was placed going away from the outside wall; this one goes away from the inside wall. This arrangement makes everything sturdy enough to stay in place until the final "lockdown" steps (which have to wait until the earthbag levels reach the tops of the window boxes) can be completed.

12, And...repeat the process.

"Utility tubes" may or may not be the right term but does get the point across. If I ever decide to install a standard junction box, the number of access points built into these walls will prove excessively redundant. For the foreseeable future, however, we'll be running on electricity that gets into the home via heavy duty extension cords and nothing else. That works for portable generators, which we are currently using, and also for current provided by the wind turbine--which is not yet up and running. When it is producing, however, the battery bank will be connected to an inverter which possesses four AC outlets. Just plug a cord into any outlet, run the cord through a utility tube, and we're good to go.

In-city building codes wouldn't allow such a thing, of course. Which is one very good reason why we don't live in a city! We've lived that way before, using nothing but extension cords for the mountain cabin in Montana, 1999-2002, and are living that way now in the camp trailer. So no big.

But the access ports do need to be considered during the building process, not after. Drilling holes in foot-thick earthbag walls after completion would be asking for trouble, not to mention just a bit difficult to accomplish in the first place. I settled on installing these ports at the same level as the windows for the sake of simplicity and also to keep the tubes well above the ground. We don't want an ambitious young Mojave green rattlesnake to find a nice, low hole through which to access the home's interior. We'll still need to use steel wool and/or other "stuffing" measures to fill the holes that are actually in use at any given time, but no venomous snake in this area is going to scale four vertical feet of exposed stucco to find a way in, so....

The other use for the ports is to allow addition of propane lines, whether those are (in the end) copper pipes or rubber hoses. Gotta have heat.

Installing the "port tubes" didn't take long. The steps were:

1. Cut 10 chunks of 1 1/4" PVC pipe in 19 inch lengths. That diameter will allow a heavy duty extension cord's plug to pass through easily, and that length will allow for the thickness of (a) exterior stucco, (b) earthbag wall, (c) airspace, and (d) interior insulating wall...with enough left over to take PVC caps (for those pipes not in use at any given time).

2. Add a cap to each chunk of pipe.

3. Place the tubes wherever they seem "right". For this home, "right" amounted to having two walls with two tubes each and two walls with three tubes each. The extra tubes were placed to service the kitchen and office areas...just in case.

 Before tackling this phase of the construction project (stucco netting addressed in the last Hub plus windows and utility tubes covered in this one), I'd estimated the time required at about a week.  That turned out to be a bit optimistic, partly because putting on the tarpaper/wire went more slowly than expected and partly because unrelated personal business wound up limiting my work-on-the-house time.

Even so, it wasn't all that bad:  Eleven days, a time overrun of 57 percent.  If our government contractors could do that well....

But that's another story.