Start at the bottom and work your way up!

Sunday, June 27, 2010

And Now, for the first course

Memorial Day weekend Schmemorial Day weekend. I have made a ground breaking decision. I will no longer state on the blog when I will next be posting. Apparently exactly a month has passed since my last post. Summer is in full swing here in Alaska which pretty much means that you have to decide if you want to sleep in late or go to bed early. Or go to bed late and get up early! I seem to be perenially awake at this time of year. So much light, so many things happening, so much live music! Somehow around all of this, we are making progress on the house. At this point we are 11% complete on the tire pounding stage. What this means is that we have pounded exactly 60 tires. People say "so by pound you mean like........" We smile and say" like with a hammer"
Before the description follows, a disclaimer. If you are planning on building a structure out of recycled materials, I strongly urge you to beg, borrow or purchase all the books you can get your hands on relating to earthships(Micheal Reynolds), green building, food growing, greenhouses, small space building, positivity and self help(to help with the mantra of "everything always works out for the best" or "close one door and another will open" etc.)I am only providing a basic explanation of what we are doing and I don't want anyone to feel misled by the seeming ease of taking these matters into your hands. Don't feel discouraged, just know the that the reality of the situation is that Anyone can build themselves a functioning, sustainable home as long as they pay attention to the amply recorded mistakes of others. We can be sure that errors will always occur, but if we make new ones, then we will continue to learn.
The process for pounding a tire is as follows:
1) Start with a good compact foundation. (If you need more info about foundations, read the previous blog entry "the pad before the pad before "The Pad"", OR contact a professional(not specifically in that order))
2) Layout your tires _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ <--- they will look something like that
3) Choose your tire to start on, preferably one on the end of a wall, remove it from its place and use a level to assure that the ground beneath the tire is level all the way around. Lay your tire down and dump a full wheelbarrow of dirt in it. Use your hands to spread the dirt out into the walls of the tire. Get another wheelbarrow and keep adding dirt and packing it into the walls of the tires until you can't cram anymore in with your hands.
4) Pick up that sledgehammer you knew you would need sooner or later and swing it down into the tire so that the head of the sledgehammer pounds dirt under the lip of the wall of the tire. Repeat while moving around the tire in a circle adding more dirt when needed. Continue this until the tire walls start to swell upward and get hard. Once there is no give at all, get a level out and make sure the top of the tire is level all the way around. If it isn't you will have to pound more dirt in on the low side to bring that up to level. Once the top of the tire is level all the way around, top off the hole and you're good to go! One down, 517 to go....
We have had 2 pounding sessions with friends and family and are starting to get our flow going. If you have been interested in coming out to help, now is a great time to do it. Once you get a couple or 6 people pounding, shoveling and keeping things going, the time flies! As far as the house goes, there isn't much new to report. We have our work cut out for us, but each day brings progress and the neat thing about this style of building is that once you fill a tire, it is finished. All you have to do is cover it with stucco or your locale specific mud product and doesn't need much more attention. This brings about a real feeling of accomplishment as the sweat is rolling down your face and breathing is ragged and you think, did I really need to dance until 3am last night? But then you look down at that beautiful row of tires and it is all worth it.