Welcome to the Belize Eco Village Bulletin 8 update for our master-planned community based on renewable resources and sustainability systems. We are eager to hear your questions and thoughts regarding our planning, planting, and progress posted the first Thursday of each month. Our values, virtues, and vision are on previous posts. More eco-friendly people are ready to discover Belize and decide if it is right for them to live a healthier lifestyle. We share our experiences regarding our lessons learned in order to help others. A special thanks to Austin Norris for flying the drone to record our construction, landscaping and planting progress.

There are many good reasons to take a closer look at Belize for a Plan B retreat and retirement haven. With basic education and information, it is easier for you to be able to make more informed decisions regarding a healthy investment and lifestyle opportunity. If long-term happiness, health and well being are high priorities than our ecovillage may be a great choice for you. The goal of each Bulletin is to educate and inform readers about the benefits of Belize and our eco-community.

Stabilized Compressed Earth Block Home #1 & #2

We started Stabilized Compressed Earth Block Homes #1 and #2 in May and both have the bond beams completed. In spite of delays, distractions and rains our October trip progress included the crew working on plastering house #1 and #2 with three coatings. The form boards for the bond beam have been removed from house #2 and as soon as the roof material arrive we can start on the metal roof. Why metal you may ask? We feel it will be less expensive, look great, save trees and stronger.

Rainy season in still hindering our planning, planting, and progress. After I left on October 10 the plan was to have the roof materials delivered on October 16th but the rains and threat of a tropical storm continue to cause delays. We have had to delay the delivery of roof materials and starting on the caretaker house until the weather improves. When the two homes are finished we can house the caretaker family and Bruce Carroll the new construction manager to help establish our future development plans. Bruce is an American living in Belize for over 10 years and a great addition to our team.

The drainage ditches dug in March keep excess rain runoff from washing out our roads during the rainy season and provided raised dirt berms for over 30 lime trees and 130 coconut trees. The culvert installations are delayed due to rain runoff which is still hindering progress. We are still waiting for it to dry enough for a bulldozer to contour additional land, clear more access lanes and the boundary lines that were surveyed. The Beltraide proposal for New Spanish Lookout is progressing nicely and we plan for it to go live on their website by the end of October. We are still waiting for the drilling contractor to drill a water well as an additional source of water.

Monolithic Dome Homes

While the Stabilized Compressed Earth Block (SCEB) has proven to be excellent for constructing a quality home, after a few challenges were discovered, we made a modification for house #2 and future homes. While we are pleased with the SCEB homes we are already investigating the concept of building Monolithic Dome Homes. We believe the Dome homes may allow us to build a cool and cost-efficient eco-friendly home that is fireproof, mold proof, storm proof, and termite proof with the least cost and material use.

We are looking at Monolithic Dome Homes because they may have even a lower carbon and water footprint long term. We chose them after looking at over a dozen options because they are easy to maintain and extremely energy efficient. While we are not building one yet and still calculating the construction costs we feel confident our cost will be even less for the dome homes than the SCEB homes.  We are hoping early pioneers will be able to buy a .25 acre lot and small dome home (excluding Stamp Tax and General Sales Tax – GST) to live in our eco-community for even less than the $99 K we project for SCEB homes. Therefore a couple should be able to live comfortably on even a small retirement or Social Security benefit of $1,000 per month.

On October 19th and 20th, Carlos Reyes and I have a visit planned to meet with the experts at the Monolithic Dome Institute in Italy, Texas to learn more about dome homes and an idea for dome eco-lodging for our Belize Eco Village project. Stay tuned for more details as we evaluate the benefits and costs associated with building dome homes in Belize in early 2019 after the rainy season ends.

Next Michael Morningstar NEWS blog

Exciting Botanicals at Expo East

Compressed Stabilized Earth Blocks Video from Belize Eco-Village > >