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Elina Monferrer had a dream: to leave her routine behind and live near the sea. But when she found the place she wanted to start a new chapter, she ran into a difficult obstacle to solve, since she did not have enough money to buy the land.
Now retired as a librarian, she decided to look for an unconventional solution. Along the way, she gave up a very special childhood possession and found a way to build that allowed her to turn her project into reality without relying on a traditional construction job.
Her story ended up becoming a commitment to green building in the seaside town of Los Angeles, near Necochea, Argentina. There, she built a home with thousands of recycled bottles and showed that, with ingenuity, help, and persistence, a dream that once seemed far away could take shape by the sea.
How did she get the money to buy a beachfront lot?
In 2011, Elina Monferrer discovered the seaside town of Los Angeles, a coastal community about 30 kilometers from Necochea, in Buenos Aires province. The scenery convinced her she wanted to live there, but the lot she liked cost $7,500, and she had just $900 to put down as a deposit. Instead of giving up on the project, she turned to a personal loan and got help from her aunt Herminia, who also took out a loan to help with the purchase.
At the time, she was still working as a librarian and used part of her salary to keep up with the payments. The opportunity came when she remembered that she had kept a collection of Donald Duck comic books since childhood and decided to sell them to a Brazilian buyer for $1,800, money that brought her closer to her goal, along with the loan her father took out to cover the closing costs.
With the lot secured, she still had to figure out how to build a house without the budget for a conventional project. That is why Elina began researching eco-friendly building options, such as adobe homes, the use of discarded materials, and walls made with reused bottles.
How she built her house walls with 14,500 recycled bottles
To find an alternative to bricks, Elina got in touch through Facebook with Ingrid Vaca Diez, a Bolivian lawyer promoting homes built with reused materials, who guided her in gathering the containers she needed to build the walls. She asked relatives, friends, and neighbors not to throw away empty bottles and also went out looking for the ones she found on the street.
On her trips from Tandil to the seaside town, she carried the containers in the trunk and on the seats of her car to fill them with compacted sand and place them in rows, joined with a mix of cement and sand, much like bricks. With help from her aunt, a mason friend, and advice from a master builder, Elina was able to build her house with the money she had, putting it into cement, iron, and other materials, without setting a deadline to finish.
What is the eco-friendly house she built to live near the sea like
The walls are 37 centimeters thick and are made mostly of plastic bottles and glass containers to let in light. It is worth noting that Elina designed a home with a bedroom, a bathroom, a powder room, and a large living room that could also serve as a kitchen and host relatives during visits, but the house has conventional foundations, columns, and roofs because the bottles were used to build only the walls.
Elina finished the roof in 2018, after buying the wood little by little and getting flexibility on labor payments. In May that year, she retired as a librarian, and on July 1, she moved permanently to the seaside town of Los Angeles, after eight years and with a few things still left to finish, such as plastering less visible areas and painting the walls.
The home is about 70 to 80 meters from the beach, she told Infobrisas. Her daily life is not limited to enjoying the scenery, either, as she runs a small grocery shop, makes chipa for visitors, and crafts handbags from soda can tabs.