Earthbag Bus Repairs

A cool thing happened the other night.  I was on my way to meet the phenomenal Deonne Kahler at Taos Mesa Brewing to see a band, and the thought crossed my mind that I would run into my neighbors from the mesa there, Brenda and John, even though I hadn't seen them there or anywhere since last summer.  Lo and behold, I was right, and they filled me in about the earthbag dome they're building on Brenda and her husband Charlie's property, down the hill from Serendipity.  I also met a new neighbor, Diane, and it turns out she's from Montreal, which is where I was born.  The whole encounter really made me itch to get out to my land, but I had a problem to figure out first, one that I'd been procrastinating dealing with all summer.

At the beginning of June, I went out to my land and discovered that the last functioning skylight in the Sky Bus (the other two were gone and boarded up when I bought it), had blown off the roof and cracked.  If you're not familiar with the Taos mesa wind, that should put it in perspective.  The skylight was closed, and the wind was enough to open it, separate it from its hinge, and blow it right off the roof.

Bummer.

So I needed to decide how I was going to fix that before spending any real time out there, especially since the monsoon season has hit.  I finally sat down and gave it some thought yesterday morning, because I was going to go out there in the afternoon.  I had decided I was just going to Gorilla Glue a piece of tarp over the opening as a temporary solution, and was packing up to head out, when I had the sudden brilliant realization that I could use an earthbag instead.  Since my son was going with me, he could hand me buckets of dirt to fill the bag in place on the roof, and then just lay it down over the opening and tamp it to seal any cracks. 

So that's what we did and it worked great. 

I did lay a plastic bag liner over the opening first for added coverage.

It worked so great, in fact, that we decided to go ahead and do it with the other two missing skylights as well.  Since they were boarded up only on the inside, they still leak when it rains a lot.

Halfway through filling the second bag. 

The ugliest of the three.  Notice my lame attempt from last summer to seal it by inserting pieces of a sleeping bag mat.

Next time I go out there, I'll paint over the bags to keep the sun from eating them, and I think they should hold up at least until next summer.

Another thing I accomplished yesterday was to bring a bunch of the bags home with me.  They've all just been sitting there in a huge pile under a tarp, so I want to eventually get all of them out of there.  One of the benefits of having them at my house is also that I can get them all inverted before I actually start to build.

We stopped to visit Brenda's building site on the way out.  They're doing a 20-foot diameter dome just like ours, but they're using mesh tubing and they've got this very interesting DIY barbed wire they've created.  And John has come up with a brilliant bag-filling device with wheels.  I can't help but feel a little jealous that they've accomplished in a month more than it took me two summers to do (they're now about three courses above ground level), but on the bright side, it's inspiring to see and motivates me to start turning those bags inside out!

Project Gingerbag House

In the Earthbag Building book, it's suggested that one make a model of one's house before attempting to build it.  While the idea intrigued me when I read it, I didn't seriously considering making a model of the Enviro Dome I'm going to build until this holiday season, when it occurred to me to make one out of gingerbread.

Since my house will consist of domes, I decided that I would construct my gingerbread model in the same way you make a clay coil pot, which would be similar to using earthbag tubing.  I looked around online to see if anyone else has made a gingerbread house this way, and while I didn't find any, I did find a few gingerdomes that were constructed in other ways, such as this geodesic one:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/35535885@N03/4153861565/.  (The image is password protected, so I couldn't copy it in.) I also found a really cool site that features "green" gingerbread houses. 

I wanted to make the model as close to scale as possible, and I used plastic yogurt container lids of two different sizes as my templates.  They weren't precisely the right diameters, but close enough. 

I started forming the first "course" of "tubes" around the templates,

 

 but then realized I needed to place them on a base.

I used Jolly Ranchers topped by half a Life Saver for my door forms, and planned on removing them for the baking process, then putting them back in afterwards as the actual doors.

Justin was really good at making the "tubes,"

which I then moistened and stacked, trying to bring each "course" in just enough to get the corbelled dome effect.  Once the domes were finished, I removed the candy doors and replaced them with a tin foil form.

Gingerdomes!

Into the oven went the house.  When it came out, it looked like this:

Gingerblob!

 

 

I had suspected this might happen, but other than the fact that I couldn't do my cotton candy berm now, I really didn't mind.  The purpose of this experiment was more about going through the process of creating the domes, rather than having some perfect finished product. 

In retrospect, building the gingerdome this way was more like building with cob than with earthbags.  And like cob, which needs to dry between building sessions, I should have baked a few "courses" at a time, just enough to give it some solidity before adding more.

Graeme and I were standing over the blob, gazing at it rather forlornly, when he said, "Wait!"  He turned the baking sheet around, and said, "Look - it's a perfect troll face."  And indeed it was.

Gingerface!

 

 

 

 

Well, it wasn't quite what I'd had in mind, but who was I not to go with the flow?

That was one tasty face.

Happy Holidays!

Diggin' It

On August 18th, I finally started digging the trench that will become the foundation for my house.  For those of you not familiar with rubble trench foundations, you can go here to read all about it.  Basically what I'm doing is digging a trench around the circumference of the domes that is 18 inches wide by 18 inches deep.  Then I'll fill it with about 6 inches of rubble consisting of rocks from around my property and then another 6 inches of scoria on top.  (Scoria is also what I'll use to fill the bags later.)  In the building plans it says that the first two courses of earthbags will then be double-bagged and will constitute the foundation of the house, with the top of the second course 6 inches above the pad, which will be finish floor level. 

However, Owen Geiger emailed me the other day suggesting that I raise the building site by adding two extra courses of earthbags, then later laying scoria up to finish floor height, which would then be about a foot higher. (He also posted about this process here.)This will help keep snow and rain from entering the house, and the insulating properties of the scoria will mean a toastier floor.

So I think that's what I will do.  However, that's a ways down the road.  At this point, I'm hoping to simply finish digging and fill the trench before the ground freezes.  

And speaking of freezing, the weather has shifted dramatically here in the past couple of weeks.  It's like summer just up and ended, BOOM.  It's been raining a lot, and it's gotten alarmingly cold.  I haven't been able to shower at the bus let alone dig my trench.  The plan now is that we'll be moving into town for the winter at the end of this month.  

I'm actually looking forward to it.  If it was just me with no kids, and the bus was enveloped, and I had an indoor bathing system set up, I think I could live in the bus for the winter, but none of those things are the case.  Also, I've begun to miss certain things.  When I first moved out there, I was afraid I'd really miss a bathtub; what I wasn't expecting is how much I miss having an oven.  I love to bake almost as much as I love to bathe, especially in the fall and winter.  Pumpkin pies, Christmas cookies, my eggnog cheesecake (which once snagged me a marriage proposal), all that good stuff.

I just hope the weather clears up enough for me to get some serious digging in before I move out.  I can still go out there and dig after I move, of course, but it's just not as easy as getting up at the crack of dawn and walking out to the building site.

I have to say I've really been enjoying digging.  There's something so primal about it, so satisfying.  I love seeing the bold outline of the circles begin to take shape.  It's actually hard to explain what's so fulfilling about it to me.  I keep trying to think of metaphors and the only thing that continually pops into my head is using a cookie cutter.  Making shapes out of a blob of dough.  This is kind of like that except at a much, ahem, deeper level.  I love the feeling of slicing down through the dirt with my shovel.

Also, there's something about going down into the earth that strengthens the sense of connection with it.  As soon as I had a few feet done, I had the irresistible urge to get down in the hole.  And it's a whole different perspective from there, quiet and solid.  
 

Leveled

Rainbow over the building site

In the earthbag house plans I bought from Owen Geiger, it says, "First, clear and level the building site."  That one sentence, those seven little words, became my entire summer.  And this, initially was for two main reasons:  1) I didn't have enough money to hire a guy with a backhoe, and 2) because of having to work, I could only work on the site an hour or two a day, and not even every day.  Compounding these were the intense smoke from the Las Conchas fire through most of June and July, and the intense heat during the middle of the day.

I had this idea starting out that I could get the house finished before winter, and if I had hired a guy with a backhoe, maybe I would have.  But after I realized that this simply wasn't going to happen, something very cool happened.  I gave myself over to the work; I allowed myself to fall into its rhythm. I began to look forward to moving my daily inch of earth, just as I looked forward to other little daily tasks unique to my new living situation.  It's all just part of this life, I now understood, each task as significant and ultimately meaningless as any action in life.

I came to look forward to rising at dawn and brewing coffee on my Coleman stove, writing in my journal, then going out with the mattock to chop grassy lumps, and eventually with a shovel, a rake, and a wheelbarrow to move dirt around to level the site.  I didn't care how long it took anymore or how hard it was or how dirty and imprecise. 

I realized I didn't actually want a guy with a backhoe to do it for me, even if I could afford it.  One day it struck me that the process I was involved in was much like giving birth at home - it was MY work, my transformation.  I was about halfway through the leveling process at that point; I was leveling the earth as it was leveling me.

My handheld tools powered by my lifeforce and gravity will have provided the foundation my house will rest upon until it is not more.  And that could be a very long time, far longer than the life of the body responsible for it.  Because it is not in fact the body that does this work, but the spirit does it through the body.  The body is just another tool.

In the Earthbag Building book, Kaki and Donald say, "Action dispels doubt," and that has become sort of a mantra for me.  Every time I've felt overwhelmed by the scope of the task, not having a clue what I'm doing, I've simply gone out there and started, and something in me has known what to do.  It's as though the earth in my bones is listening to the earth beneath my feet; it's an intuition deeper than than an idea.

When I first realized how hard and time-consuming it was going to be to level the pad by hand, I started looking for shortcuts.  I thought, Hmm, it's really only the rubble trench foundation that needs to be level, so I'll just start digging from the highest point and measure the 18 inches from there, and then level the trench with rubble later.  And then the floor can be leveled with scoria much later.

I could have done that, but that intuitive earth in me wouldn't let me.  On the practical level (no pun intended), I realized that I'd end up spending more on scoria down the line, but deeper and more primary than that was the need to become intimate with every inch of this project, this land.  The need to do it completely, to inhabit it.

And the joy of seeing that little bubble in the center of the level window is so worth it.  The joy of raking earth into spirals starting from the center of each dome circle and working my way out.  The joy of standing on the ground of my one-day house and seeing it now flat and round, looking like Owen's construction drawings.

Dirt is Heavy

I have been thoroughly enjoying living on my land, but I have to say, July was a frustrating month of major obstacles.  Trying to get anything done in July was like trying to ride a bicycle backwards.  I knew going in that things could take longer than I was planning but had no idea just how incredibly slowly it all would move.  Part of it is because of things like computer problems and checks that came late - things unforeseen and not directly related to the building work.  But part of it is that I didn't have a clear idea just how long it takes, and what hard work it is, to clear and level a pad by hand.

We started, as I've mentioned here before, by hacking away the sagebrush.  In retrospect, that was the easy part, although it's probably good that I didn't know that at the time.  And that grass, oh my God, the grass.  That stuff has incredibly deep roots, and it's hard to even see where it all is.  I'd think I'd gotten most of it but then I'd notice  - oops, here's a spot, there's a spot.  And have to drag the mattock out again.

I got to a point with it where I just wanted to do something, anything to feel like I was making progress, so even though the site was still all lumpy and sloped, I put my center stakes in for the two main domes, and tied rope to them, which I had premeasured to the radius of each dome.  Then I drew out the circles and marked them with orange chalk powder.  Somehow seeing it laid out like that cheered me and gave me a new sense of momentum and energy to go back to dealing with the clearing/leveling process.

Doesn't look like much, but believe me, this represents hours and hours of hard work.

But then, wouldn't you know it, it started raining.  Which, as anyone who lives in a dry climate knows, one may NOT EVER complain about, so I won't.  I don't even want to; the rain has been glorious in many ways and for a variety of reasons which I'll go into some other time.  However, it washed my orange circles away as well as prevented work on the site for several days, during which time the grass GREW.  Aargh.  Well, at least it was more visible now.  And truth be told, it's nice grass and I'm sure I'll enjoy having it around my house, once it's built.  Just not IN my house, thank you very much.

Anyway, in the past few days I've managed, with Graeme's help, to churn up what was left of the grass (I think, I hope) in the circle of the main dome.  And since then, I've been shoveling and raking and shoveling and raking to redistribute the soil from the highest places in the circle to the lowest.  It's getting there, although I hesitate to say, "I'm almost done," as I've said that before and then been disappointed when I realized I wasn't anywhere near.

But out of all this - this long drawn out building process and readjusting my entire life to living in a bus and doing all my work at a cafe and hauling heavy things like water and dirt around and dealing with dead rodents my cat brings in and watching the enormous moon rise full over the little lights of Taos spread out and waking in the middle of the night to seven cows surrounding the bus and spectacular skyscapes daily and on and on - dare I say it - I've developed patience.  

I'm not in a hurry anymore.  The house will be done when it's done, and in the meantime, I have land to enjoy and a bus I'm in love with and a lifestyle that fits me like my favorite pair of jeans.

driving home in a rainy sunset

Graeme's the pot of gold

Sky.  Two Peaks.  Bus.  Oh yes.

Why I'm Building With Earthbags

When I first started researching alternative building methods several years ago, earthbags weren't even on the radar.  I never once came across them in my many hours of wandering the Internet.  With this recent round of research, I discovered them right away, literally within minutes of Googling "alternative building methods."  Why?  Because of two men, Owen Geiger and Kelly Hart, who have taken it upon themselves to disseminate information about this method freely and widely.

After reading on their Earthbag Building website and on Owen Geiger's Earthbag Building Blog, I was quickly sold.  Earthbag building is a simple, dirt cheap way to build an elegant, incredibly strong structure with little or no building experience.  

Geiger also has a blog featuring nothing but a cornucopia of earthbag plans he's designed, which further simplifies the process.  For a very reasonable cost, you can order any of these plans from him.  The plan I've picked out is the Enviro Dome:

 
I've chosen this plan because it's one of the simplest to construct while still providing enough space for my needs.  I also like the fact that it can easily be added onto later.  Using the dome structure means that you don't need a separate roof, which is another plus; you just earthbag it all the way up, using a simple compass to keep the angles accurate.

On another level, the dome structure appeals to me because it resembles a beehive (I don't call myself The Pollinatrix for nothing.)  For years, I've been fascinated by the peregrini, wandering Irish monks of the early Celtic church who would set up beehive-like cells wherever they stopped and stayed for a while.

Monastic beehive cells, circa 6th century,
on the island of Skellig Michael, off the coast of Ireland

Soon I will get to live in my very own 21st century "Be Hive," as I've come to think of it.    

Geiger estimates that you can build a house with earthbags for around $10/sq. ft., using recycled and scavenged materials.  The polypropylene bags needed can be bought from a variety of suppliers at low cost, especially if you buy misprints.  However, these bags can also be obtained for free with a little perseverance.  I've starting looking for local suppliers, and recently found my first bag benefactor, a company in Santa Fe that goes through 20 - 30 bags a week, which would otherwise be discarded.  I am in fact going there today to pick up my first free load of bags.  I figure if I can find about five more suppliers such as this, I can likely build my house without ever having to purchase bags.  It's just a matter of finding businesses like farms and ranches, breweries, etc, that regularly use materials like grain and feed that are packaged in these bags.

One of the wonderful things about Owen Geiger is that he is 100% invested in helping people build this way, as was quickly proven to me when I first began commenting on his blog.  Every time I've asked him a question, he's responded within a day or two with a helpful and detailed answer.  When I first commented that I had decided to use earthbags, and sent him the link to my blog, he immediately responded with enthusiasm and suggested that I use scoria for my bag fill, as its plentiful in my area (there's a volcano nearby).  Kelly Hart built his earthbag house this way, and it's just brilliant.  Scoria is highly insulative; I recently came across the blog of a couple who've built their earthbag dome house this way in Montana, and they say they've been warm all winter in it with just a crappy woodstove.  Scoria is also much lighter than dirt, so the work goes "ten times faster," according to Geiger.  It's also way less messy than using a dirt fill, which needs to be mixed with water.

Since choosing this method and starting this blog, I've discovered a variety of other bloggers who are either in the process of building with earthbags, are planning an earthbag house, or have already completed one.  Just peruse my blogroll, and you'll see what I mean.  I've even found a couple of people in my area who are or will be building with earthbags.  All of this is just incredibly encouraging, to see that truly anyone, no matter how inexperienced at building, can do this, and do it very inexpensively.  And to be part of what feels like a true movement at a time when that movement is really taking off is exciting, especially when there is a sense of community simultaneously building around it, no matter how "virtual."