Well friends, here we are, March 26th, 2014 and today is a very special day….we finally got to lay the second half of our first foundation bag and close the circle that will grow to be our goat mud hut dome structure, yay!!  Here’s the photo….it was lightly/moderately raining for most of our ‘window’ today…window being the 4 hour block that Accuweather told us it would not be raining, so by the time I realized I didn’t even get a photo of our hard won victory after frantically tarping our vulnerable adobe bag, I had to settle for this. But trust us, it’s under there…snug and cozy for the next few days until the rain stops.

If you are curious about my choice of title for this post, do the math….last post was March 6th and I left off telling you that the excavator was coming that Monday and we’d be off and running…it’s now March 26th and I’ve just told you that we finished our first foundation bag today.  Yep…..20 days to tamp down the foundation and lay one row of bag (minus the buttress walls, still have to do that to officially say we’ve completed the first row, and two more foundation rows to go after that).  But don’t let this lead you to believe we’ve been doing nothing but drinking margaritas on the deck all this time, oh no, no, no.  I’ll do my best to give you the short version of the last three weeks….it’s been quite the ride!  Fortunately, I am well aware of the fact that I signed up for this and despite the snail-paced progress in getting a groove going and enjoying the satisfaction that comes with seeing our efforts take on real, manifest form, I am still having fun and learning A LOT…check.

Now before I get into the whole foundation saga where I am beginning to see a light at the end of the tunnel, I have to say that even before I left Winnipeg I was projecting that the foundation and final weather-proofing membrane would be the biggest challenge for me given my ‘green’ status as a builder and the fact that I’ve decided to build my first ever structure for a dear friend in one of the rainiest regions of the continent, no pressure.  Well, it definitely seems that my initial projections regarding the foundation have come to light, as projections are want to do, but I still have time to shift that final weather-proofing membrane scenario into one of cool, calm, relaxed nonchalance; “pfff, 50.8″ of annual precipitation, gimme a challenge!”  So the next few paragraphs will be the unfolding of my jaggedy initiation into not only the art of building with Superadobe, but also my readiness and willingness to accept my role as the ‘leader’ of this project and all of the accompanying insecurities that  undoubtedly surface when we choose to exit the comfort zones of our lives and place ourselves in a completely unfamiliar role in unfamiliar surroundings doing an unfamiliar activity.  I’m starting to realize (with the help of some great mirrors, thank you Meggan) how much I’ve allowed that inner chatter-box that is my doubting ego state it’s opinion and stifle my inner guidance and ‘knowingness’ during this research and planning phase.  The aspects of this project that I am confident about, I am very confident about.  But the aspects that I am insecure about, ie, the foundation and anything that has the word ‘weather-proofing’ in it, I’ve really been tripping myself up on.  I’m working myself back to trusting that I already have all of the knowledge I need for this project to be a success and what I don’t know right now, I have a great handful of people I can call or ask (thank you Ian, Paul and the Cal-Earth forum!  And all of the friendly, knowledgeable locals!) or my Guides and Angels will provide me the information when the time is right, thank you Guides and Angels!  So all I have to do now is take one step at a time, and know that things are exactly as they need to be and enjoy the feeling and experience of wearing a different hat for a while.

Oh, and before I go on, I know most of you have been waiting with baited breath to find out which soil sample I went with….it was the silty sand from the pit at Teddy Bear Hauling in Yelm.  We had one dump truck’s-worth, 12 yds, delivered last week.  (That’s cutie Cyrus in front of the dump truck…he’s a big fan of trucks.  He got to see a live excavator AND a dump truck within two days, can you imagine?)

Now, on to the foundation goings-on of the last few weeks. The original plan I’d felt we should go with was a french drain set outside the bench-height buttress.  This buttress will wrap around the whole dome and the french drain would be laid to the outside of that based on recommendations and detailed drawings from the weather-proofing class of the Cal-Earth workshop itself and further information regarding supplies from the helpful staff at Mountain Lumber here in Yelm, WA. I still had questions about the right approach for the actual foundation bags that lie in the dug out trench and how to protect them from groundwater seepage but  I seemed to lack a certain base construction language required to even ask the questions I wanted to ask.  I was hoping an answer would magically plop into my lap at some point.

If you’ll remember from the last post, I’d made mention of meeting with a woman who had started building a Superadobe home for herself here in Rainier.  We did this as well as organized a round table lunch meeting at the house the following day with Roger the builder, Wayne the plumber and Robin the artist, in-the-know locals of building different types of structures in this particular climate.  Bless them all for taking the time.  The woman with the dome structure even gave us her extra wide door forms to use for our extra wide goat door, amazing!

Essentially, by the time these two meetings took place, the original foundation plan was derailed completely based on new information we’d gathered from talking with everyone.  We rescheduled the excavator and I had a whole new foundation plan in place.  And I was happy for it because it meant the pressure was off me….’what if my plan didn’t work?  Surely everyone else around here must know more than I do about these things!  That french drain was just adding to the overall cost of the project anyways.’

The new plan was this:  Builder Roger had the well-intended and sound idea to use 6 mil black plastic sheeting and wrap it around the 3 foundation bag layers and skip the french drain altogether given the superior draining ability of this rocky Washington soil.  The suggestion was intended to help us keep it cost-efficient and simple. Everyone around the table agreed this was a good idea which was all I needed to hear to jump on board too even though I could not for the life of me visualize how we were going to neatly wrap straight pieces of big bulky plastic around bags set in a circle…with buttress walls sticking out the front to boot!  But even with my reservations, it seemed like a good enough idea for all I knew.  I felt that safety in numbers feeling given that we all said ‘yes’ to the plan.  I chose to accept that it would be an awkward stage for me regardless and that I would deal with the bunching plastic like the Zen pro I like to think I am.  I’m sure poor Roger must have thought my skull was as thick as that roll of 6 mil plastic with all of my questions about how this wrapping was going to work.  Roger is quite a straight-up, genuine, why-make-it-more-complicated-than-it-has-to-be New Yorker-type of character, heart of Gold….in fact, I’m surrounded by quite a few (ex) New Yorker-type of characters out here, this whole household for one….I must be calling their confident, natural-born-leader tendencies into my life!

So there we were with a new foundation plan in place and we could move forward and prep for the excavator that we now had coming in a few days.  Phew.

Here is some photo footage of the steps we took over the next week or two as we prepared for the impending excitement of finally laying the first Superadobe Earth-filled sandbag!

We hammered in the center compass stake (with help from Roger and Cyrus and Mama Meggan taking the photo), first task on our worksite proper!

Then we attached the compass chain, measured the radius of 7 and a half inches to mark the inside diameter circle with the nail-removing end of Roger’s hammer (not to be confused with Rogers and Hammerstein).

And Voila!  Our very own crop circle!  (Notice the orb between Roger and Cyrus.  Just sayin’…)

We were now ready for Tony the excavator to come and dig the trench for us…..he painted the outline with non-toxic spray paint before he dug so there was no guesswork….kind of like a surgeon will ask their patient to mark an ‘X’ on the knee that is to be operated on with permanent marker.  Not a bad idea.

The first dig!

BTW, anyone building one of these domes near Rainier, do yourself a favor and hire an excavator.  I was marvelling at the hilarity of the image of Meggan and I digging the trench by hand….these are a few of the boulders he dug up in the 15′ diameter trench (!).

Conversation between me and Tony as he was plucking one of these babies out of the ground:

Tony:  You weren’t really thinking of digging this by hand were you?

Me (with eyes bugging out):  Yup.

Tony:  I just saved you a surgery.

Me:  Yup.

Here’s the final pile of boulders that came out of the ground and a simulated demo of what we would have looked like digging the trench by hand.

They now serve as a goat playground.  Nothing is ever wasted!

And here is our freshly dug trench, ta daaa!

Next step was to tamp and level the trench…Meggan is a Tamptress to be reckoned with!

Then we used the compass chain to put wooden stakes around the trench marking our 15′ circle to use as a guide when we start laying bags.  Tony’s digger savvy notwithstanding, there was no way anyone would have been able to maintain a straight cut here.

Next on the list of course, was laying the plastic for underneath and around our foundation bags.  By now, which was this past Sunday, we had exactly 2 more dry, sunny and warm days to get these 3 bag layers laid in the plastic-lined trench and wrapped before a week of rain was predicted.  No small feat!

At the risk of sounding overly dramatic, suffice it to say that March 24th will forever be touted “My day of reckoning with 6 mil black plastic sheeting”.  Now keep in mind that the whole time we were doing all these fun things; making crop circles, choosing our soil, excavating, tamping, etc.; somewhere in my subconscious mind I’m dreading the bunching plastic-wrapping job coming up, the very act of dreading it making it feel all the more dreadful.  Not only would we have to figure out this ever-stressful (for me) bunching plastic lay pattern (you know I’m going to have to make ‘bunching plastic’ one of the tags of this post), but then fill and lay 3 rows of 18″ wide Earth bags with barbed wire between them, just the two of us, in two days before the rain threatens to muck up (literally) all of our efforts.  I even got Roger to stop by quickly on his way to another job to show me again how I was supposed to wrap the ‘T’ where the buttress meets the dome.

It was then that he realized the buttress walls were not free-standing.  I hadn’t told him they have to be integrated with the dome walls….he hadn’t asked….he didn’t know to….I didn’t know to tell him.  At any rate, his momentary look of puzzlement in learning that minor detail sent alarm bells blaring in my head.  But in his experienced builder nonchalance that I strive to attain one day, he just shrugged and showed me a little folding technique that would probably be fine.  Oh no, this would not be fine at all.  Roger was my only anchor for this bunching plastic technique…that momentary ‘look’ made the voice in my gut scream and kick even louder!  But there we were, with two days to get this done….we’ve got the plastic, we’re here ready to work, may as well just get it done and hope for the best, right?  I made a valiant effort to embrace the ‘un-fun’ task ahead with positivity, austerity and the self-projected reward of a celebratory bonfire by the river with a cold beer and some drum jamming when it was all over in 48 hours.  Well it was over alright, in less than 48 hours too!

That day with the plastic took me through a crash course in “Learn to be a Leader, 101”.  I’ll spare you the details but as I tried my best to outwardly put on a false air of, “Yeah, no problem, this is kinda hard but we can still have fun, it’s all good, right?”, inside I was experiencing a whoosh of overwhelm that included fear, uncertainty, pressure to perform (self-induced of course), confusion as to why I was sensing an increasing air of impatience from my friend as I needed to think through, yet again, this bloody Rubix cube-like plastic puzzle.  Finally it was voiced that I needed to sit with it for a minute so Meggan (happily I’m sure) went to go check on her son who was napping inside.

So there I was, alone with 100 yds of black plastic sheeting standing in a 3 foot trench.  Irony aside, I resolved that I would complete the laying of the plastic sheeting today come hell or high water, preferably the former in this case.

So that is what I did….I wrestled and laid, dragged and re-laid no less than 9 awkward and, you guessed it, BUNCHING pieces of plastic into that trench as best as I could for the rest of the afternoon.  One of the ants from an anthill near the worksite took a moment out of it’s busy day to take this photo with my camera, bless it,  so I can always look back and remember what it looks like when I fight my intuition.

But by golly, I did finish laying that 6 mil black plastic sheeting before sundown and even I have to say, it looked not too bad when all was said and done!

But a bitter-sweet victory it was as this still meant we now had only one full day to lay 3 entire layers of Earth-filled sandbags complete with buttress walls, not to mention the ever-dreaded wrapping job itself!

But it would never come to pass as that evening Meggan and I had a good heart to heart about how the day went, vocalized some of our concerns and observations about the process and each other, she mirrored to me how truly anxious this foundation process was making me, and I humbly contemplated those words for the rest of the evening.

In fact, that very night I dreamt that I was looking to purchase something at two different places and was denied until I discovered I had been holding in my own two hands that which I was seeking to purchase from an outside source the whole time.

As I sat up in bed early that morning, I heard my authentic voice loud and clear saying, ‘The plastic has to go’.  So I repeated out loud to myself, ‘the plastic has to go’, as if to acknowledge that I’d heard it this time.

I sent off an S.O.S. call to the Cal-Earth forum to confirm my 6 mil gut feeling and that the dome would be sound with a french drain on the outside of the buttress bench (the original plan) and foundation Earthbags laid directly on the well-draining tamped Washington Earth.  I didn’t wait for the response before telling Meggan about my dream and that we would not be using the plastic but laying our first bag today directly on the ground.  She sensed my shift and immediately was on board with that as well.  While she organized for her son to go to school that day so we could lay some serious bag, I went out and undid everything I had done the previous day which was symbolically healing and comforting and gave me a moment to reflect on the last 24 hours with gratitude while making peace with that 6 mil black plastic sheeting. This was so beyond it being about using plastic sheeting or not using plastic sheeting.  I swear my lungs expanded with every piece of plastic I removed.  It felt good to see Mama Earth again.

We were able to lay one half of the first row that day in 5 or 6 hours, just us two, feeling our spirits renewed at finally being able to start laying down some of the actual goat dome, working with the Earth and feeling the sun on our faces.  Here is the result of our work that day.  Is it just me, or is it smiling?  🙂

The other half of that ring was laid today (see beginning of post).  There was a profound symbolism in completing the first circle. As Meggan mused, ‘The first circle is always the hardest.’

The foundation won’t be perfect as I later discovered the importance of a water vapor barrier via the Cal-Earth forum.  But it’s going to be just fine and we will have a sound and solid goat mud hut to be proud of when all is complete.  I will use the next few rainy days to my advantage to find the most suitable reinforcement to deal with this water vapor issue.  But I learned that it can be dealt with even post first bag and the worst case scenario isn’t all that bad.

I’m looking forward to the next leg of this journey.  The learning curve is steep but (and I’ll do my best to leave you with a zinger here) when you can jump into the trenches with both feet, get drenched and muddied and tossed around a bit but come out at the end of the day with a smile on your face, that’s a good day.

And much akin to my understanding of purgatory in the religious sense as being that holding space between heaven and hell, it’s easy to see the parallels here.  But I have faith in the direction I’m being pulled now that I can hear the directions loud and clear again.