Well folks, this is it, we’re 4 rows from closing the dome.  Hard to believe, really.  And you can imagine how small the rows are at the top of a dome….the top one of course being the ‘capstone’ so to speak so hardly a row at all.  It’s an odd and exhilarating feeling to think we are here, so close to this pivotal moment after all we’ve done, all we’ve been through!  Take a look, take a good long look at this baby….she’s beautiful, isn’t she?

I want to savour these last moments of laying Earthbag which will complete my very first mud hut and initiate me into the ever-growing Earth builders community at large.  Anxious as I am to finish it yesterday as we’ve been all too aware of the time pressure of the last few weeks with so much work to do yet and a looming June 8th departure date, I know there will be a part of me that will feel wrenched away from such a now familiar and sacred daily routine here in Rainier.  Other than this last power week while Blake was here, I’ve developed a morning ritual of preparatory tasks that have become my daily meditation.  While Meggan would be focused on her morning farming and Motherly chores, I would head out to the dome area and just sit with it, looking at it, thinking about next phases coming up, admiring it, photographing it some days, and then I would slowly and methodically begin to prepare some of the day’s necessities….filling the tractor with Earth from our Earth pile, cutting the next length of bag, chipping the leftover cement off of our shovels that we would continually forget to do the night before, and my all-time favorite, straightening barbed wire….who knew that straightening barbed wire would be such a relaxing and satisfying activity?  Certainly not me!  That first hour in the morning with just me and my thoughts and the birds chirping became part of my everyday reality.

Now as we are so close to closing, I can say it’s a really special feeling to look at something so big and beautiful and solid and say to yourself, “I was a part of this….from the first dig to the moment of placing the capstone on the 15′ high dome, I was there!”  I’m sure I can speak for both Meggan and myself when I say that we will both be forever changed by this experience in our own way.  Check it out….we started with an idea and both decided to go for it, in all of our naive glory, jump in with both feet, and see what happened.

Well, so far, this is what happened:

Here’s the start of the project:

From that exciting first dig:

To today, exactly three months and 13 days later:

I’m proud of us!  And wouldn’t you know it, Opal, one of her current 5 adorable goats and future inhabitants of this dome, is due to give birth tomorrow, Wednesday, May 28th, if all is on schedule!  It wouldn’t surprise me one bit if she gave birth on the same day we actually close the dome.  Here she is with her full belly looking healthy and ready to do her thing!  How excited am I that I get to see adorable baby goats right before I leave!

The rest of this week will be focusing on these two things….closing the dome and Opal having two (or three?) healthy kids, not necessarily in that order.  I am certain both events will go without a hitch!

So now, some details from the last couple of weeks so you can see more specifics of what we’ve been doing at each phase.  As you know, Blake, the Angel that swooped in for a week fresh out of the 3 month apprentice program at Cal-Earth, was such a huge help on every level while he was here.  He just left Satruday morning and was heading to a Permaculture farm in Montana for a week to help them out and learn some cool things to coincide with a course he’s been taking on the subject before conducting a couple of workshops on Superadobe basics North of here.  It was so great having him here, not only for his invaluable help in getting us in a good position to be able to complete this project in time (we laid 13 rows in the week he was here!) but he certainly provided a solid wealth of knowledge about different aspects of building with Superadobe that were a bit cloudy in my mind.  He was able to quell some fears about the water element that continues to confound me regarding weather-proofing and the construction process.  For one, I learned that it’s not the end of the world if the Superadobe bags get wet, and you can build in the rain after all.  If not for the unpleasant factor, you could technically work right through a downpour, but who wants to do that?  Wouldn’t be the safest workplace being 12 to 14 feet up off the ground with no proper scaffolding and slippery, not-quite-foot-width Earthbags to stand on, but it could be done.  It’s freaky enough being up that high on a sunny day!  In fact, here he is in the rain shortly after arriving, ready to dive right in, bless him!

The week before his arrival was a power week in itself with great weather, our new cement mixer from Giselda and Ariel in operation and having two awesome helpers on two separate days, Linda and Johnathan, Giselda and Ariel’s son.  The mixer has been life changing!  We had to connect no less than three long outdoor extension cords from the shed in order to get power to it but well worth the stretch…it single-handedly eliminated our having to hand mix Earth from that day forward….a HUGE energy saver!  I have to say though, there is no on/off switch on this mixer so we have to plug and unplug the extension cords whenever we need to use it.  I feel like a mad scientist about to get lit up every time I connect the two ends.

Here is the blessed mixer doing it’s magic!

Meggan finishing off a row of bag laying and I laying barbed wire:

Linda tamping, bless her, as she herself has a tamping machine which does all the hard work for her so I’m sure she was really feeling gratitude for the machine with every effortful hand tamp she did for us on that row.

We also had a new helper in Johnathan, Giselda and Ariel (of cement mixer fame)’s son.  He’s a great guy, a rapper (we tried to get him to rap about goat mud huts), and an amazing help who was up for anything and everything.  We even had him laying bag the first time he came by!  He helped out the following week when Blake was here too so we were able to maximize our production that day…pretty sure that was the first record ‘3 bag day’ that I posted last blog.

And then of course we had the second power week with Blake.  Blake’s arrival was at a perfect time as we were just coming up to the crown of the door form and the buttress finale.  I had looked back at the photos from the Cal-Earth workshop I’d taken back in September as to how we’d come over the door form and decided I would take the same approach here laying long finger buttresses in an arch over the door, flush with the inside diameter of the dome.  This, despite the fact that I had started the door buttresses with a bit of an outward splay to them for esthetic purposes and to create a wider entry for the goats but then realized halfway up that the force would probably be better absorbed if they were straighter and more parallel to each other as is normally done with the Cal-Earth domes, likely with reason.  I started angling the buttresses ever so slightly to be more parallel with each other every row from then on which was going to have a bit of a ‘double helix’ effect/look.  I thought it would be kind of cool but then worried that I may have created a pseudo ‘pronation’ situation in my door buttresses, oh dear!  But after studying my entry arch and buttress options I’d decided that the way we did it in the workshop would work and all would be well even if perhaps the force was not going to be dissipated in perfect resolution with the laws of physics (I never did do well in high school physics).  So all that to say, Blake arrived just as we were arching over the door form with these ‘buttress fingers’ and it was perfect because I may not have remembered to brick tamp the Earthbags so tight and flush to the door form as he did to make them as solid and contiguous as possible.  I felt very good about the door buttress when all was said and done.  After a few days of building and getting a few rows above the door, we took the door form right out to test it for real, and let me tell you, something happened to me the first time I walked into that dome without having to do the sideways limbo under the wooden form….I don’t know if it was the elation from realizing that the dome didn’t collapse in on itself and was standing solid as a rock all on it’s own or what, but it was a pretty special moment!

Meggan trying it on for size….perfect, no?

Some details and an inside view:

With the door completed and no more buttresses, the last milestone other than closing it was to finish laying all of the PVC and glass window inserts in the walls.  The biggest day for that was the first day Johnathan was helping us just before Blake arrived and we’d cut 5 PVC ventilation windows into the dome, the two lateral points on both the side wall 5-pointed stars and the center point of the back wall 5-pointed star.  .

It was at this level that I realized we had officially gone above our heads, in a good way, and were really starting our inward corbelling, yes!

Next inserts were the two huge glass water jugs Meggan found at Sunbirds camping supply store in Yelm…she was Jonesing for some big light windows all along and when she saw these, she bought three of them to replace the mason jars for the remaining points on the back wall….a good choice I’d say.  I decided to do what I had become good and used to and cut them into the dome wall.  In hindsight, I would have just set them on the wall without cutting into the bag and laid bag up to them on the next rows as our Earth was semi-crumbly on one of them which created a bit of a droop below the cut, especially since we didn’t have to worry about maintaining any kind of downward slope with these ones.  Alas, the dome stands strong regardless of it’s many characterful imperfections, as Superadobe domes will.

This is where we’d gotten to by the time Blake arrived.  He arrived late on Thursday and we started working on Friday and literally worked everyday until the following Friday before he left this past Saturday.  He was even game to come with me to Linda’s one of the days to help work on her pumphouse Earthbag structure.  She was thrilled for the extra help (we got two full rows done for her, a banner day!) and being able to pick his brains about vault construction.  Blake was happy to learn from Linda some ingenious ways to make working by oneself easier and more efficient…one of Linda’s specialities is finding the most efficient way to build with Earthbag, especially if you find yourself building solo.  So it was an amazingly productive week to say the least.  There were a couple of days where it was just he and I when Meggan was working, a couple of days where it was Meggan, Blake and myself and a couple of days we had  helpers with us.  Johnathan one day, Lori’s friend Lana Kila, a beautiful soul and another former New Yorker who has studied architecture in Hawaii (which is where he was given his Hawaiian name meaning ‘victory or to be victorious’), and finally Linda and her friend Peter, a fine and friendly gentleman who has an interest in potentially building an Earthbag structure himself one day.    Additionally, the Weather Gods were gracious the whole week!  Here are some highlights:

Early on in the week, mixing up stabilized Earth to start our day.

MixMaster Meggan

Focused barbed wire laying

Top o’ the door form to ye!

5-pointed stars COMPLETE!!

Johnathan and Blake mixing Earth.

Interior of the dome

Our opening is getting smaller and smaller….!

Assembly line production of Blake, myself and Peter, Meggan and Linda keeping the flow of mix coming our way and Cyrus, the tricycle supervisor making his rounds.  You’ll notice Blake got us started on some of the exterior rough plastering too!

This was the last day of a wonderfully productive week with Blake to whom we will forever be grateful for his generous assistance, thank you Blake!!  😀

We all took it easy on Saturday to rest our weary bodies.  Yesterday, Sunday, Meggan, Cyrus and I went out and laid one more bag in the morning before the rain came in the afternoon and this is where we stand as you saw in the beginning of the post.

Today was supposed to be raining all day and dry tomorrow but it appears Accuweather got their days mixed up, not one day after giving a nod to their relative accuracy, classic.  Today has switched to mostly cloudy but dry and tomorrow looks like more of a chance of rain so I am contemplating going out later to lay a bag or two.  At any rate, this is an exciting and monumental week as we will close the dome and most likely bear witness to some fresh new baby goats entering into this Earth realm.

I will look forward to sharing both events with you within the week.

Life is a wild ride of awe and wonder isn’t it?