Day Five

October 6, 2023

mud and concrete

well it rained. which happens eventually in all builds, i’m told. it wasn’t too bad, though at times i really did need my rain jacket. it stopped around 2pm, but stayed cloudy (we like cloudy) until we quit for the day, at which point it was sunny and lovely.

and that’s something learned there - consider the weather of where you want to build. what would be the best month of the year, weather-wise?

so we spent most of the day trudging through mud, having our shoes get heavier and heavier. i forgot to bring the Bogs from home, and it’s a very good thing that my boots are waterproof. they didn’t let us students pound tires on the wall because it was too slippery and we’re inexperienced. which is why i got into…

concrete. two 5 gallon buckets of gravel, two 5 gallon buckets of sand, half a bag of cement, and half a 5 gallon bucket of water. mix it in the mixer, dump that into a wheelbarrow, then run it into the muddy area where we used it fill the gaps between all the tires. you can see that in the pictures below.

you can imagine what a wheelbarrow of wet concrete weighs. i could get it as far as the lip of the muddy floor, but then someone heftier had to wheel it through the mud to near the wall. it was too much for me. (wayne, you’d be a welcome addition to an earthship build.)

something that’s pretty neat is that there are really great conversations to be had when doing tasks with others. i was placing the concrete with 3 other people and we had a really good talk going and it made both time and job go by quickly.

i had a delightful talk with nico (28 year old from south america) and it was really neat how genuine and engaging he was. everyone here has travelled wwwwaaaay more than i have. spent a year in india, came from poland, lived in bogota, originally from cape town. there are 2 women here who recently left a ‘professional’ lifestyle that they found unrewarding, sold their house, and now find themselves on this earthship build. one has been driving and camping for the past 3 months.

yeah, i guess you could call them hippies, and i’d say many might self-identify as hippies. and yes, they’re dirty (we’re ALL dirty). but they’re not dirty hippies, if you take my meaning.

i don’t want to oversimplify or over romanticize who they are or may be, but here, at the build, they’re just genuinely here, working on something they believe in, thinking it might be something they want to do for themselves. not everyone is like that, of course, but i’d say most are.

slide show of left, middle, right.

the berm on the left side of the building (viewed from the front). note the guy in the maroon poncho (nico), he’s going to be a frame of reference for a couple other pictures. that’s the second level of hard insulation, on top of the first, that is buried in dirt. not only is the berm pushed up there, but the excavator operator (nate) has dumped dirt between the insulation and the tire wall. this not only supports the tire wall, but it gives us somewhere to stand as we pound the tires and the wall gets higher. nate is really, really good with that thing. everyone is aware of it’s presence, and he’ll come in with that big bucket and dump dirt when some people are just a foot away. we’re being careful, but no one bats an eye either when it’s close by.

this next picture is the berm behind the structure, but from the other side. see nico? you can see the cooling tubes have been covered and more hard insulation is waiting to be put into place.

this next picture is in front of the structure, see nico? you see the front end of the cooling tubes. to the right of the first tube is something white on a diagonal. that’s the water feed coming from the cisterns into the house. cisterns aren’t in place yet, but they’ll be ganged together and brought in there.

the next three photos are of where i spent a lot of time today. mixing the concrete and then placing it on the walls.