Pumping the Breaks and Taking in the View
Before I forget again, I wanted to thank Megan Bachman from Yellow Springs News for writing such a thoughful, thorough article about our family project a couple weeks back! Check out the article here.
This past weekend was our first weekend working on our home together as a family. Even though only one of us was able to work at a time (as the other had to watch our wild, death-defying stunt man of a son to ensure he survived), it felt so right to finally be spending time on the land together. We had 6 people stop by throughout the day on Saturday to help out and we finished out the day sitting by the fire after Elliot had gone to sleep for the evening. We spoke about how lucky we were to be able to build the home of our dreams and meet new people every weekend. It is reinvigorating to see fresh faces and build the sense of community we have always yearned for!
Sunday, Elliot and I had to leave pretty early on in the day to pick up our chicks and ducklings from my in-laws who watched them while we began construction on our home. Thus, Zac worked tirelessly with two volunteers/ participants (one being his brother, John) to pound tires and prep the site for the two french drains we will have in the back of our home. The weekend ended with 20ish additional tires pounded and with a lot of questions being raised about how best to move forward.
We have chosen to reframe how we view our project as we see this the only means of surviving what lies ahead of us. There is a lot of work to be done in hammering out the nitty-gritty details of how our home is to be constructed now so that we don't have to redo work later on down the line. We had a huge push to simply get ourselves ready for the first workshop weekend and now we need to take a step back to make sure that everything done from here on out is intentional, well thought out and approved by the county (always helps... haha).
Thus, we consulted with Michael Shealy from Touch the Earth Ranch in Colorado this past Friday to run some of our design ideas by him. Michael designs and constructs sustainable homes and also does consulting work. He was tremendously helpful and was able to provide some very concrete answers to questions that had been looming for many months now. As an aside, if we could time-travel back to October, we would likely just purchase one of Michael's designs and then have a local architect stamp those drawings instead of going through all the fuss we have had in doing our own.
Shealy recommended nixing the idea of constructing our bedroom walls with straw bales and advised we use earthbags instead. This suggestion was made because with straw bale walls, we would end up with very heavily insulated walls but we wouldn't have the thermal mass we were shooting for. Remember, thermal mass is related to weight and an earthbag wall would far outweigh that of a straw bale wall. Thus, we chose to use earthbags which would store more heat after the sun goes down and make our house that much more energy efficient He also recommended that we lean the north tire wall back into the berm as we build (2 inches backward per course of tires); building the berm up along the way and tamping it as we go. This process, he explained, would help keep the long straight wall from collapsing into the home or into the berm. We may also be adding some concrete buttresses along the back of the north wall as well to aid in additional support since we aren't building in the traditional earthship u-style. This decision will hopefully become clearer when we discuss options with the architect we are working with this week.
In looking for answers to our questions, we stumbled upon the following e-book written by Michael Reynold's himself: Engineer's Report: Seismic Performance Evaluation and Tire Construction Analysis. We would highly recommend this book to anyone out there looking into building an earthship home of your own as it covers a lot of the questions our county has had for us along the way and we hope that the answers it provides will address their concerns.
I don't do so well with unanswered questions so I'm feeling a bit squirrely and anxious for decisions to be made about how best to proceed. At the same time, I'm trying to not forget that we are in the midst of a golden era in our lives and are going to look back at this period of our life and fondly recall the building process, the meeting of new people, and the shedding of our old life. So I'm trying to be mindful and be thankful that we have the ability to make our dreams a reality now and realize that we need to toss aside any time table we had originally approached this project with. Time tables don't work well in the world of construction and even less so in the world of sustainable building construction. Our approach now is to take each issue as it comes, do the research, make a decision and move on to the next. Looking at all the hurdles we have ahead of us at once would be death to our morale.
With that said, we are postponing the workshops we had planned for as there is no way of knowing how quickly or slowly we will progress through this process. We will continue to work on our home every weekend though at the very least and will begin to take more time to publicize the free skill building/ work weekends that anyone interested (over the age of 16) can participate in! Every skill building/ work weekend will be weather permitting of course (another thing I cannot control: mother nature! ugh) but just email me dates that would work our for you and we will get you signed up for as many FREE skill building/ work weekends as you would like!
We are quickly seeing that it isn't helpful to look at each portion of this process as a to-do to be checked off the list. This is something we need to relish as it happens as a substantial portion of our lives is going to be dedicated to working on our home from here on out. So in just looking at this week, we hope to hammer out some of the details of our drawings that haven't been fully developed with the county and the architect we're working with and possibly begin the french drains in the back of our home before jumping too far ahead of ourselves. I vow to allow myself to bask in the golden age of change that is upon our family for life is far too short to live in the future.
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This past weekend was our first weekend working on our home together as a family. Even though only one of us was able to work at a time (as the other had to watch our wild, death-defying stunt man of a son to ensure he survived), it felt so right to finally be spending time on the land together. We had 6 people stop by throughout the day on Saturday to help out and we finished out the day sitting by the fire after Elliot had gone to sleep for the evening. We spoke about how lucky we were to be able to build the home of our dreams and meet new people every weekend. It is reinvigorating to see fresh faces and build the sense of community we have always yearned for!
Sunday, Elliot and I had to leave pretty early on in the day to pick up our chicks and ducklings from my in-laws who watched them while we began construction on our home. Thus, Zac worked tirelessly with two volunteers/ participants (one being his brother, John) to pound tires and prep the site for the two french drains we will have in the back of our home. The weekend ended with 20ish additional tires pounded and with a lot of questions being raised about how best to move forward.We have chosen to reframe how we view our project as we see this the only means of surviving what lies ahead of us. There is a lot of work to be done in hammering out the nitty-gritty details of how our home is to be constructed now so that we don't have to redo work later on down the line. We had a huge push to simply get ourselves ready for the first workshop weekend and now we need to take a step back to make sure that everything done from here on out is intentional, well thought out and approved by the county (always helps... haha).
Thus, we consulted with Michael Shealy from Touch the Earth Ranch in Colorado this past Friday to run some of our design ideas by him. Michael designs and constructs sustainable homes and also does consulting work. He was tremendously helpful and was able to provide some very concrete answers to questions that had been looming for many months now. As an aside, if we could time-travel back to October, we would likely just purchase one of Michael's designs and then have a local architect stamp those drawings instead of going through all the fuss we have had in doing our own.
Shealy recommended nixing the idea of constructing our bedroom walls with straw bales and advised we use earthbags instead. This suggestion was made because with straw bale walls, we would end up with very heavily insulated walls but we wouldn't have the thermal mass we were shooting for. Remember, thermal mass is related to weight and an earthbag wall would far outweigh that of a straw bale wall. Thus, we chose to use earthbags which would store more heat after the sun goes down and make our house that much more energy efficient He also recommended that we lean the north tire wall back into the berm as we build (2 inches backward per course of tires); building the berm up along the way and tamping it as we go. This process, he explained, would help keep the long straight wall from collapsing into the home or into the berm. We may also be adding some concrete buttresses along the back of the north wall as well to aid in additional support since we aren't building in the traditional earthship u-style. This decision will hopefully become clearer when we discuss options with the architect we are working with this week.
I don't do so well with unanswered questions so I'm feeling a bit squirrely and anxious for decisions to be made about how best to proceed. At the same time, I'm trying to not forget that we are in the midst of a golden era in our lives and are going to look back at this period of our life and fondly recall the building process, the meeting of new people, and the shedding of our old life. So I'm trying to be mindful and be thankful that we have the ability to make our dreams a reality now and realize that we need to toss aside any time table we had originally approached this project with. Time tables don't work well in the world of construction and even less so in the world of sustainable building construction. Our approach now is to take each issue as it comes, do the research, make a decision and move on to the next. Looking at all the hurdles we have ahead of us at once would be death to our morale.
With that said, we are postponing the workshops we had planned for as there is no way of knowing how quickly or slowly we will progress through this process. We will continue to work on our home every weekend though at the very least and will begin to take more time to publicize the free skill building/ work weekends that anyone interested (over the age of 16) can participate in! Every skill building/ work weekend will be weather permitting of course (another thing I cannot control: mother nature! ugh) but just email me dates that would work our for you and we will get you signed up for as many FREE skill building/ work weekends as you would like!
We are quickly seeing that it isn't helpful to look at each portion of this process as a to-do to be checked off the list. This is something we need to relish as it happens as a substantial portion of our lives is going to be dedicated to working on our home from here on out. So in just looking at this week, we hope to hammer out some of the details of our drawings that haven't been fully developed with the county and the architect we're working with and possibly begin the french drains in the back of our home before jumping too far ahead of ourselves. I vow to allow myself to bask in the golden age of change that is upon our family for life is far too short to live in the future.
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| My wild maned guys taking a break from working on the house |
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