Framing
Finally, it's time to frame!  We are running out of time on the construction loan.  We will have to extend the loan, and the bank will jack up the interest rate one percent for each extension.  We need to hurry up. Although it would be possible to frame all of this ourselves, it would take the two of us FOREVER! And there are a few things that we would absolutely have to have help with. So, we needed to find a framer.  In Colorado Springs right now, anyone that can swing a hammer has a job, and framers are in high demand. Not to mention, we wanted someone with some experience and some creativity. We looked for a framer for a couple of months, anticipating this day, but we couldn't find anyone. Then, by one of those sheer coincidences, our concrete guy, Doug, hired a fellow to help him, Art.  Art happens to have a son in law that is a framer! This was the very day that the concrete work was finished.  So we hired Art's son in law, Jose, and his crew of 7 guys.  All of the framing took about three and a half days once I had all of the materials on site.  They really got it done.  It cost $2000 to have them do the framing, but it was certainly money well spent.

I mentioned before that we changed the roof design, and we changed it quite a bit.  In our blue prints, Michael Reynolds used tires to step up towards the back of the house, to get the right pitch.  When the engineer looked at the
Almost $8000 worth of lumber.
Working to get the correct elevation for the roof.
plans, he wanted us to fill the top two courses of tires with concrete, completely. For some dumb reason, I let him make the changes and later saw that his design would be really difficult, if not impossible, and more expensive. Just about the time I started to think about how to get out of doing the roof the way the engineer wanted, a designer/builder named Mike Shealy happened to stop by our site.  He's built many tire homes, including the one he lives in, and has tried to streamline some of the details, to include the roof.  He gave us a new design, we got the engineering done, submitted the changes to the regional building department and pressed on.  I think that this design is very slick.  Essentially, the roof pitch is obtained by 2X6 cripple studs that get longer as they go towards the rear.  This gives the joists a flat surface to rest on, unlike the original plans.
Here's another change from the engineer.  This is the header that spans the front of the building.  The Earthship books and plans call for building this beam from 2X12's, 2X6's and plywood, if I remember correctly.  The engineer hated that idea. So, we have a 16" micro-lam --doubled. Pricey stuff, especially when compared to 2X12's and 2X6's. What you see here is actually 6 beams, two spanning between each bearing point.  The bearing points are where the sticks are pointing up.  It took nine of us to get these things in place. You can also see the cripple studs in this picture, above the tires and below the beam and joists.  They get longer as they go towards the rear of the building.
Before we start framing for the greenhouse/hallway, we thought it prudent to dig out the planters. (Besides,some of the lumber was 'special order' and wasn't on site yet.)  Pro's to digging out now included being able to use a track hoe to dig them out--which was GREAT, whereas the con's were making the front face framing more difficult to get to, and rain eroding parts of the planter interior. Our soil is crazy hard and to dig these out by hand would have been long and difficult.  With the track hoe, both planters only took most of one day.
The next part is where we made a potentially disasterous mistake.  The engineer changed the struts on the front face from redwood or pressure treated 2X6's to micro-lams.  I hemmed and hawd as to what to use. Surely most Earthships have used 2X6 with no problems.  This would be cheaper and easier. The cheapest would be pressure treated wood.  I chose not to use pressure treated because it's usually very wet, and as it dries, it twists and bows MAYBE cracking the windows. Not to mention the arsnic/chromium issue I talked about on the Bond Beam page. Redwood would not have this problem to
the same degree, but it's much more expensive than pressure treated. Our  plans were already approved using the micro-lam, which turns out to be about $500 more expensive than redwood. Micro-lam will stay straight and true forever, wet dry, whatever. So micro-lam it was. It's a special order item, so it took a few days to get it. Here's where we made our mistake. Jose and his crew came back to frame the front face.  The plans call for these struts to be 4' on center, which they did.  Well, the plans were drawn for 2X6, which is 1 1/2" wide and micro-lam is 1 3/4" wide.  When the micro-lam was put on 4' centers, our window openings shrank 1/4", making them too small to use the standard patio glass that is used most often.  We'd have to have custom glass units made.
Our immediate thought was that we'd just cost ourselves $1000, but luckily, that wasn't the case.  It looks like it will only be about $300 more, which isn't too bad. Of course, if you add that $300 to the $500 more that we paid for the micro-lam that caused this problem, you start to see the expense of making changes. Some things you simply can't change if you want the building to work.  Our glass will be at a 60 degree angle (although there are plenty of Earthships that have vertical glass), our kick-up--the part of the roof directly above the glass--is at about 25 degrees, to make sure that the winter sun can hit the roof and melt any snow.
Once the struts were up the house really started to look like a house. The number of strangers just stopping by really increased and many of them showed a great deal of interest in the entire concept.  It's been a lot of fun giving tours and showing people one alternative to conventional housing.

With the struts up, we could begin sheeting the roof.  We used 5/8" CDX plywood above the rooms and 3/4" CDX above the greenhouse.  Why, they are different, I'm not positive, it was just how it was called out in the plans.
The roof has a little more pitch than it looks like in this picture--but not much.  I would do this a little differently next time. a little more pitch going north to south, would result in more pitch to the east and west by the cricket.  Water runs off of it, but I'd like a little more pitch.  It was amazing to watch the size of the rooms grow as the sheeting went on.  One would think that putting the lid on would make the rooms seem smaller, but the opposite was true.  Best of all, though, we finally have some shade!!

The picture on the left shows how we used the cripple studs to get the roof slope. The left of the picture is the south side. The studs get longer as they move to the right, making water run south into the cricket..
Here is one of the most important parts of an Earthship: the sky lights. Each room will have one operable skylight to ventilate the building. combined with an operable window on the front face, excellent convection is achieved, and cools the building.  For the time being, we just have the framing in for the sky lights.  We will cut though the decking (and the roofing) later to complete them.
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