Photos taken in 2004

This is our family, we have 5 children (3 boys & 2 girls) and together we have built an earthship. We has done everything ourselves with a little help from friends & wwoofers.

Some may say “Your children are too young?” and I just smile and say “I believe in child labour.” The fact of the matter is that building our earthship has made men out of boys and created something we are all vey proud of.

Many people have asked us to share our story so here goes...

I was raised on a farm that had bush, we loved to play in it and I always dreamt of owning my own piece of bush someday. For about 15 yrs after Karen and I married we had a picture of native bush on our fridge. In 2002 I became very disgruntled because I couldn’t see how we could realize my dream and the picture got thrown away.

In January 2003, having fun tramping in the bush with my sons and some of their friends I broke my leg when jumping off a bridge I hit bedrock.

2 operations & 4 months later I was allowed out of hospital but still unable to walk. I was going crazy, Karen was at work, the kids all at school and the bed-ridden boredom was killing me.

Doesn’t look to bad after been put back together again, but 8 years on and there is still discomfort with every step.

I rekindled my dream and started searching and found this place, just a short drive of where we were living. We bought this 7.47ha (18.5 acres) block with the intention of building a conventional retirement home here in about 2020.

We bought our caravan out here and stayed weekends and we loved it so much that we said to ourselves, “Why wait until we retire?”

We looked at many conventional homes but we thought they where to expensive and going down that track would make another dream of ours impossible, ‘to be totally debt free before I was 50. (And I can proudly say we achieved that when I was 48). We are by no means rich, but we have no debt and that has a richness of its own.

The idea of building a tyre house started as a joke, we didn’t know about the earthship concept but when we find it on the internet we were over the moon. We chatted online with some owners of Earthships in the USA and decided to see if we could get building consent from the Waikato District Council. They supported the idea from day one and once the plans were done, they were approved in 5 days.

The rest of our progress you can see on this website. We are now approaching the finish and it has taken us 5 years. If someone told me it would have taken me this long to build (mostly in free time after work) I probably would never have started; I am so glad no-one told me ‘cos we love our earthship.