Introduction

To have a home does not require 30 years of debt. Unfortunately, due to ignorance and lack of experience, many people today get exploited and have to work very hard for many years to own a house.

The Vedic Way of life is based on the idea of “simple living, high thinking”. We believe that we should not spend our life working very hard to pay debts, but instead work only the necessary and dedicate our time to higher purposes.

In order to achieve self-sufficiency, one requires to have the basic needs covered: food and shelter. There are countless methods of construction that are based on natural materials, and it would be impossible to cover them all. Some of the popular ones are:

• Adobe
• Sandbag
• Straw bales
• Wattle & Daub
• Rammed earth

They all have their advantages and disadvantages. Main disadvantage is that almost all of them require a special combination of straw/clay/dung. Since different locations will have different types of soil and circumstances, we thought of creating a new system, that similar to the sandbag construction methods wouldn’t depend on any particular type of soil to work. We called it “Murali-Rama” construction.

The sandbag method doesn’t require special soil, but is very labor intensive because of the massive amounts of soil that one requires to move. With Murali-Rama one obtains something solid, cheap, and  less labor intensive than other methods.

Here’s a series of videos that show the process of making your own house, using only bamboo, earth and few hardware tools. This kind of house gives a more modern “cement house” feel, which makes it much longer lasting and easy to maintain.

Please watch the following series of videos with a real-life example:

Videos

Murali-Rama house – General concept

Foundation and Pillars

Bamboo wall system

The $2000 USD Bamboo House

Emergency shelter – Disaster recovery

The Murali-Rama construction method can be made as cheap as necessary adapted to disaster zones, and able to create emergency shelters in very short time. For example, instead of building two bamboo walls, a single plastered wall would provide a comfortable shelter quickly, at almost no cost. The roof could be made with bamboo or a suitable grass (Vetiver) if necessary and no external industrial materials would be needed.

The only requisite is that there has to be bamboo already grown in or nearby the disaster zone. Bamboo is an amazing plant that produces usable wood culms within 3 to 5 years. If you don’t have one in your nearby location please get started as soon as possible, and be prepared!