Dugout with your own hands

The dug-out on your own site is a necessary and useful thing. Most often it is used as a cool pantry for storing vegetables and billets, and sometimes simply as an interesting and unusual barn-storeroom. The dome-dome perfectly fits into any landscape of the site. Buttresses will help to strengthen the door on the construction and will additionally hold the walls, as well as provide an amazing mysterious appearance of the building.

Preparation of bags with earth

To build a dugout with your own hands, as in the photo, you will first have to stock up with building materials. In this case, we propose to build a dugout according to the most economical and environmentally friendly technology - from bags with clay or even just land. This technology of building a house from sacks with land is called earthbag.

First, determine the ground. You can take ordinary land and mix a little cement in it, you can take clay with sand. The optimal recipe for soil mixture: clay + sand + gravel. Clay should be taken 30-40%.if you take just the land, it is necessary to slightly moisten it for convenience. So it is better to bag in bags.

Then polypropylene green or white bags are bought, they should be turned out before work so that corners do not protrude. The mixture is poured into them in 2 divided doses. First you need to fall asleep by 30 cm, ram and sprinkle so that up to the top was 15 cm. Tie the bag. It is enough to prepare bags for the bottom 2 layers, and then fill the bags directly on the walls, so as not to lift them.

Drawings of the dugout

Before starting work, it is necessary to draw up a detailed drawing for the construction of the dugout with your own hands, to think over the dimensions of the external and internal diameter, the height of the room. After that, a site for construction works is being prepared.

The site is marked, cleared of debris and leveled. Inside the contour of the future dugout, the upper layer of the earth is removed, under the future walls a trench is dug for the base with a depth of approximately 35-40 cm, which is covered by gravel 30 cm. Expect that the thickness of the wall will be about 65 cm. Gravel should be carefully pressed with a hand press.

The first row of bags is the foundation foundation. For the dugout will be enough two rows of the base. In the mixture for the foundation, it is necessary to add cement for the fortress. Sacks for the base are laid along the full radius of the dugout together with buttresses. After the first 2 rows of bags have been laid, enough ground should be poured from the outside to prevent subsequent shifting.

Laying bags with ground

To ensure a smooth circle, it is advisable to find the center of the site, drive a peg into it and stretch out a string equal in length to the radius of the dugout.

Thus, you can always check the correctness of the circle. In addition to the horizontal, each row is measured using a board thrown between the sides with a level fixed on it.

Each successive row is stacked with a slight shift inward.

On the newly laid row, you need to walk several times from the top with a rammer and carefully level the projecting parts. The last pass should already be on a tightly compacted row.

Each subsequent row can be stacked using a slider.

Place the bag on a piece of tin, transport it on the sheet to the place of packing, and after it falls into its place the slider is simply pulled out from under it.

The bags must sit tight against each other. Stacking of bags tightly butt provides the strength of construction to the very top of the dome. The last bag on top will look like a mushroom cap.

Construction of a doorway

When laying walls, you can not forget about the passage. To fix the door block, you can use the so-called steel T-shaped anchors, which must be placed between bags of 3 on each side at equal distances from each other. In the plates, it is better to drill holes for the bolt anchor to fasten the door frame beforehand.

In order to build an arch over the doorway, you can use a plywood frame or, for example, an old large tire. The tire is mounted on supports and on top of it bags are laid. In the bags for the arch, you need to add more clay and stack them as tightly as possible to each other.

To install a canopy over the entrance, logs or boards impregnated with an antiseptic are taken. Those parts of the logs, which will be between the bags, can be wrapped in dense polyethylene.

Buttresses

At the same time, buttresses are also being built with reinforcement. Bags for them are placed with offset, so that on the buttress you can climb to the top of the dugout( see photo).Buttresses can be strengthened additionally with vertical reinforcement to give strength.

A series of barbed wire is laid on each row. If you plan a large dome you can put 2 rows. It provides a strong grip between the bags.

Dome

Two or more layers of black 5 mm film are placed on top of the dome and covered with earth. The earth is better to take such a consistency, so that it retains fertility and the composition is clay. Above, the earth is covered with turf. Buttresses are covered with a plastic mesh and plastered from above, because plastic bags can be destroyed by ultraviolet radiation. The house of the dug-house is built with its own hands.

We also recommend watching a video about how to make a dugout yourself and make sure that it's easy and does not require special skills.

Construction video of the dugout with their own hands