08/27/2026
I Built a Round House Out of Bags of Dirt — and Heated It With a Fire in a Barrel I marked a five-metre circle on a meadow, dug a shallow trench and started filling long fabric bags with the earth from under my feet. Course by course I tamped them flat and coiled them round, barbed wire between the layers, until the wall stood above my head with a doorway and a round window left in it. On top went a conical rafter roof and hundreds of shingles I split by hand, and over the bags a coat of ochre clay plaster inside and out. The floor is beaten earth, polished smooth. For heat I built a rocket mass heater: a brick feed tube, a burn tunnel, an insulated riser inside an upturned steel barrel, and a brick flue running along the wall buried in a long cob bench — so the chimney itself is the bench you sit on. Then I lit it, and the whole wall started giving back heat.
