After 5 years of traveling full-time in a tiny home, this family of 6 realized they couldn’t go back to a “normal” life—so they bought 11 acres of raw desert in Cochise County, Arizona and started building their own off-grid village from the ground up… using the dirt beneath their feet.

Jonathan and Ashley Longnecker @TinyShinyHome and their 4 kids are creating a natural building homestead using earthbags, hyperadobe, and superadobe techniques—one structure at a time. What’s emerging is less a single house and more a small, self-built village.

So far, they’ve built a hyperadobe bedroom, bathroom, and chicken coop, a superadobe sleeping space, and an outdoor earthbag shower. They’ve added a goat milking and kidding barn made from shipping containers, a container guest room, and a renovated 1972 Airstream Sovereign that serves as both their original tiny home and a bunkhouse for the kids.

Around these structures, they’re developing the systems that make off-grid life work: solar power, water systems, a solar pump house, and permaculture-inspired design adapted to the desert.

Now they’re working on their most ambitious project yet: what may become the world’s largest hyperadobe home—a 5,000-square-foot round house built from earth-filled bags. Along the way, they’ve refined their own approach to hyperadobe, developing a faster, more efficient building method that Jonathan describes as “almost like 3D printing” with earth.

They homeschool their kids, build nearly everything themselves, and share the process as they go—testing ideas, refining techniques, and showing what it really takes to create an off-grid life from scratch, centered on family, creativity, and self-sufficiency.