Our Earth Ship

Rick and I were just dating when he decided that his next home would be underground. Anyone else would have found that strange and probably questioned why?...not me. Nope. I had my eye on Rick Broussard for some time. And while I figured that he, too, had taken a shine to me, where he or I would live was not that big a deal for me. I didn’t care, so long as we would be together.

As it became obvious that we would marry, the idea of this underground home became the center of conversation for us. I was fine with it. If he had said that we would live out our days in a tent…I would have been fine with that, too.

After we married, the house underground became a reality. Taking nearly a year to complete, we were both involved in this earth sheltered creation. Rick was more involved than me. He had spent a couple of years researching it and even toured an earth sheltered home up north somewhere.

Before construction had even started, we both hiked into the woods and marked the trail that would later become our long and winding driveway. We purposefully dodged dogwoods and sidetracked luscious fern beds.
Harold Weaver was our general contractor. This was a new venture for him but he was more than willing to oversee Louisiana’s first real underground dwelling.

Louisiana Life magazine sent one of their writers out to our construction site. Highlighted among the unusual and peculiar homes in Louisiana, we were featured even before the house was complete. The interior of the house was still incomplete but we moved in any way with our newborn son. We were fortunate to be able to both stay at home with our little boy. Rick had enough royalties coming in to cover our household expenses for nearly four years. Together we carved out an existence in the piney woods of Claiborne Parish with our little boy by our side.

We’re still living underground and loving it! We know it’s not everybody’s cup of tea but it has certainly been ours. I can’t imagine living anywhere else. It reflects our love of nature and art. Rick and I fight over wall space for my art and his photography. It’s not fancy, but neither are we.

Our forty wooded acres surround the house and past our piney stand of timber lays more wooded land. For more than thirty years we’ve seen the trees turn lime green in the spring and back to deep red in the fall. We’ve watched our little boy grow up into a man.

Our greatest moments have been when we are all sitting around our fire pit together reminiscing about life here. We created our own little world and every now and then, we let people in.

Living underground with Rick Broussard in our ‘Earth Ship’ has been a real trip!








This is the roof of our Earth Ship. The little house to the left is the entrance from the top.  We planted our first garden on the roof.

Now it holds all the transplanted bulbs and flowers from nearby abandoned housesites.