Today was a good day out at John's. Not that we ever have bad days. I just feel like there was a lot to say about today. I think I did a tiny bit of everything today at the site. Even tamping. Barely.
Richard, the SENS director at Berea and one of my professors, came out to visit the site. He asked how everything was going- it was still a little too early in the morning to be entirely enthusiastic, so I think he got short answers. He asked if I was learning a lot, which I kept thinking about throughout the day. Yes, I have learned a lot. It's very specific though; I have learned a lot about building an earthbag dome. I have learned how to strip trees and pour concrete and hammer without smashing my thumb. I am gaining comfort with the processes of natural building. I think when I began my internship, natural building was something that I had just read about, seen pictures of, and seen in the movies Richard showed. While it made sense, it wasn't extremely tangible. Now that I've been working on the process for several weeks now, I recognize the amount of work, thought, time and materials that goes into natural building. I think this means I'm learning things.
While I've done this before, I feel that I should mention to my Loyal Blog Readers a process that I get too much joy out of doing- that is, pinning bags. There are a few places in the walls where a bag's open end will be facing an open area (as opposed to our normal stacking method where the open ends stack against other bags, keeping everything tight.) Simply folding the bags' ends doesn't work very well- they tend to come open and spill dirt. Instead, we fold over the ends and take two nails and pin the side using the nails. Sometimes it's tough to get the nails to go all the way through- those bags are tough. Phil suggested using tie-wire instead of nails- to make the wire go in and out and twist it shut. I tried that and it worked decently, but the wire bent a bit as I tried to stick it though the bags. I could go either way as far as what I pin the bags with, but I like the look of (and get more personal enjoyment out of) using nails.
Phil also showed me another way to lay the barbed wire. Once the walls get to be four feet high (which will be very soon,) we will start the curve to the dome. We will take each layer in a bit more. Since our bags are so much smaller than typical bags used for earthbag building (I think ours are a foot wide,) we decided to make the walls two bags wide. This will make it easier to tamp and give a little more structural integrity.
I do not feel capable of explaining this correctly. Thus, drawings! Behold, my mad Paint skillz.
(Above) This is the way we are currently stacking our walls. (This would be the view from above.) Each course would look like this, but the directions of the bags alternate. (The next course would, if drawn, have the vertical bags on top and the horizontal on bottom.) The red shows where we put our barbed wire. On the vertical bags, we keep it low enough to be able to snatch onto the horizontal bags that will be stacked on top of it. (I hope this makes sense.)
This is the way that we are switching to after four feet. Because the bags are not alternating directions, they are, essentially, forming two walls side by side. We need to connect the two walls. So we use barbed wire.
This is the method that I started doing. It was very similar to my straight barbed wiring in that it was forced into place and pinned where I wanted it.
This is what Phil suggested. He called this method "serpentine." Instead of straightening the barbed wire when pulling it off the roll, we keep the natural curl and just lay that down. Sounds good in theory, but I really did not like it. It did not want to stay flat on the bags and kept jumping up and smacking my arms. I didn't feel like I had much control over it. I used it for a while, but then decided to switch back to my method.(I am now done with my explaining of barbed wire.)
John had me do more math today to figure out how many bags we were going to need for something. (Now that I think of it, I can't remember what exactly was being calculated. I was too focused on numbers.) I really am rusty on my math. Easy math too. Subtraction. But I came up with the right answer eventually.
It rained today- we saw the clouds coming and were pretty ready to run to the neighbor's porch by the time it started raining on us. It was a hard rain, for about 15 minutes. We took some bags that needed to be turned inside out onto the porch.
There are two dogs at Egret's Cove and I love them very much. They both came up to the site today to walk around and visit. One of the dogs, who is quite short, followed Jessa up onto the wall, which is fairly tall. It was immensely cute.
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Yesterday, Phil and I went out to Michelle's and stripped trees for her timberframe. I used a machete and a draw knife. Both of these had very short handles (in comparison to Phil's tool that I cannot remember the name of that had a very long handle with a flat metal piece on the end for wedging underneath the bark.) This means, I got to crawl all over these logs. Most of the logs were pine, and the amount of rosin they contained was ridiculous. When I got home, my shins and arms had rosin and dirt crusted on them. My back also hurt from leaning over all day. We left with one and two half trees left to de-bark. We stripped 10. We are going back tomorrow to finish stripping and start filling bags for Michelle's earthbag stemwall.
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