BuildInLime

BuildInLime is a collaboration platform for the people who build natural homes — clients, architects and site supervisors working together on one project. It came out of our own experience of building with mud, lime and local materials, and out of finding that no existing tool matched the way that work actually proceeds.

It is built for the community of people interested in natural and alternative ways of living. Our thinking is motivated by the works of Laurie Baker, Thannal and many other natural builders, who showed that thoughtful, low-cost, climate-appropriate building is not a compromise but a craft.

Organised around what actually gets built

A conventional project tool asks you to organise work into tasks and folders. BuildInLime organises it into BuildUnits — the units of construction that get built and signed off separately. A foundation, a room, a roof. Everything else hangs off them, so a drawing, a bill and a site photograph can all point at the same thing.

Each BuildUnit has seven fixed channels: Finance, Requirements, Design, Materials, Tools, Execution and Experimentation. The set is fixed on purpose, so the same aspect of a build is always in the same place across every project.

Membership is per channel. A client can sit in Design without also being in Finance, and only members see a channel’s contents.

What it does

• Conversation scoped to the channel it belongs to — messages and threaded replies, so a decision is still findable months later. Deleting your own message leaves the replies under it intact.
• Attachments on any message — photographs, drawings, PDFs, spreadsheets, audio and video. Images and video preview inline.
• Mentions and an Inbox — a mention arrives with the project, BuildUnit and channel it came from, and opening it jumps straight to the message.
• Tasks inside the channel they belong to, assigned to people on the project.
• Web and mobile, with the mobile app built for site conditions: projects and hierarchies are created on the web, and browsed, discussed and updated from the field.

The community keeps its data

The information a community generates through the platform — its drawings, its costs, its site records — belongs to that community. We are particular about keeping it in the community’s control, and we are members of the Mozilla Data Collective in support of this.

The same applies to AI: we believe it should be built and run locally, close to the people it serves and shaped around local needs, rather than delivered as a remote service that decides on their behalf.

The platform is at app.buildinlime.com.