I built a large Giant Bamboo (Dendrocalamus Asper) house in Ecuador over the course of 3 years.

Building with bamboo is fun and challenging. This is quite a long story with many side stories. We'll try to make it snappy.

It took about a year of harvesting and processing, drying bamboo before we were ready to start building. lots of hard labor, harvesting only during waning moon to ensure best quality and durability of the bamboo.
We started construction when we had about 1000 6-10 meter pieces, immunized and dry.
About a month after we begun putting up the structure, the Colombian maestro and crew whom had come specifically to work on this project, got sick and ended up returning to Colombia, basically leaving me to find a replacement. The thing is it's not easy finding his skill set in Ecuador. We ended up training the Ecuadorean carpenter that was making us furniture and stuff and he finished the house, did a good job. He wanted to learn and with the help of our friend Javier Gomez we made it through. He's an experienced Colombian bamboo architect who has been working with Guadua Agustifoilia for 30 years or more. This was a new challenge for us as Dendrocalamus Asper is much larger and heavier to handle and build with. He has studied Guadua for many years and has built all kinds of structures using it in Colombia.

So, we built this house on a site where there used to be another cabin. It was a wood cabin that was accidentally burned down by a farm volunteer that was staying in it. So from the ashes of that fire rose Fenix, this new awesome bamboo house.

More pics and info at http://fincalegre.com/giant-bamboo.html

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