Earthshipskylights

Meanwhile...

Next we turned our attention to the skylights. Each room needs an operable skylight to provide hot air ventilation. The Earthship books have plans for building operable skylights, but we chose to buy ours -- less opportunity for leaking. A local manufaturer built these. They have a 4" curb built on with a nailing flange which makes installation a piece of cake. They also have multiple drip channels to keep condensation from raining down into the rooms. I think they were $300+ each. It was with some trepidation that I cut 3 giant holes in our storm proven roof. Luckily the weather held out just long enough. Once the skylights were glued and screwed down I had to roof around them and make sure they didn't leak. I made rubber aprons to go up the sides of the skylights, over the flange and onto the rest of the roof. Just about then the sky opened up and dropped about an inch rain. I had a few leaks, made a few adjustments and they seem to be dry now.

While we were waiting for all of the framing pieces to come together, we busied ourselves with many other tasks.
The most important of which was getting the flashing and capping on the glass, to make the place waterproof. We wanted to have this done months ago, but the person that we were working with flaked out. Lucky for us, I guess, it was before he began the job! Usually an Earthship has galvanized steel flashing because it's inexpensive and typically a "do-it-yourself" installation. We chose to go with alluminum flashing to avoid the upkeep required for steel. This was an expensive choice. We contracted this piece out as well. The caps that cover the window struts and the glass to make everything water tight were expensive too. Because we chose to use the wider micro-lam for window struts, the caps had to be much wider also. Unfortunately, I didn't do as good a job installing the window stops as I should have and the glass was not as flush with the struts as is should have been (my excuse is that it was 15 degrees and WINDY the day I installed them and my nail gun wouldn't work) We remedied this problem by putting foam tape under the caps that had big gaps and applying GOBS of silicone. High quality, and of course expensive silicone.

We also started our exterior planters. When we bought the land there about 600 cinder blocks came with it (actually I had to pay the guy $100 more for them). They had already been used once and broken apart. We used them to build the planter walls. A mason, I am not. Laying block is a lot harder than I thought it would be. The tricky part is keeping the mortar joint consistent. We were moving very slowly trying to get all the blocks in the perfect position. When I quit this project and went to find something else to work on Chris (our SuperHero-Volunteer) sped the process up a lot by not trying to get the stupid thing perfect. The wall turned out as strong as any but it is UGLY. Chris (our SuperHero-Volunteer) kept reminding me that we are going to bury most of it and the rest will be covered in stucco --"It'll look fantastic!" I'm sure he's right but it was hard NOT TO try to make every block perfect. It would have taken me forever to finish, Chris finished in a hurry. It's probably better that I didn't help too much on this one!.

Of course, with all of the beautiful curves of this house, it would never do to have these straight, sterile planter walls. So we mde the last two cells have some curve to them. Also, we gave a little elevation change to the cell dividing walls. This isn't visible in these pictures, but I'll be sure to add a picture that shows it later.

I thought that we'd have a hard time getting the square blocks to go around in a circle and I had planned on using a can/bottle wall for this section. While I was still working on some other aspect, Chris (our SuperHero-Volunteer) forged ahead and got the blocks to work just fine. This picture was before they were set with mortar. Once the mortar was on, the surface looked surprisingly smooth.

I think that it is important to mention that the blueprints show these planters as being our blackwater planters -- or our septic system. Essentially, the toilet (and only the toilet), is supposed to flush into a small septic tank and then flow into the connected planters which act like a leech field. The County Health Department would not approve the plans without a septic engineer's stamp. I called a lot of engineers and the only person that said he'd take on the project called back about 30 minutes after

I left his office and said that his boss said that they didn't have enough time. Yeah, whatever. They just didn't want to stamp something that they hadn't drawn and tested themselves. I'll talk about what we are doing about septic on a different page -- it's pretty cool. That means that we're building these planters mostly for asthetics. Because I used the re-used cinder blocks, it wasn't too expensive -- $200 worth of morter and $500 in making the footer underneath. To have done the whole thing in can or bottle wall would have been much more expensive.

By this time, the framing inspection was complete except for a letter from an engineer (yes, another one) saying that our plan for frost protection was sufficient. What was our plan for frost protection, anyway? Well, we didn't have one. The blue prints do not offer a drawing of what is supposed to happen below the doorways. The tires make there own foundation, but there was some question about the earth under the east and west "non-load bearing" walls. It is easy to get caught up in trying to get things done and forget to think. That's what happened here. We had a beautifull concrete slab poured all the way through the house and under the walls and outside. Two problems: 1. The outside concrete will get cold and transfer that cold under the walls and into the house. COLD floor. 2. What if the earth under the slab froze? The walls would be forced skyward, buckling the doors and probably the roof.

I called the engineer that was working on our new wetlands septic system (he's a P.E. so he can do structural too) and aksed him what he thought. He said cut the slab off from the rest of the house and the problem is solved. Really? Guess we'll see. I rented a "demolition saw" and cut all the way through the slab in front of the door ways. This is a dry saw, and let me tell you this job was MISERABLE! This picture shows about 1/3 of the cloud of dust I was kicking up. I couldn't see, couldn't breath...it was bad. We should have poured a full concrete footer underneath the two walls.

Usually on an Earthship these walls would be can walls but our original engineer didn't like the idea and made us frame them. The can walls probably have different bearing properties and could probably form their own foundation if done correctly. I'm not an engineer though, so I could be wrong.

We've also been working on the bathroom. In order for the entire design to work, all of the drains in the house have to be taller than the outlets that drain into the planters. This is easy if the planters are sunken into the ground a lot. Ours aren't really that deep so all of the drains from all of the fixtures have to be pushed up some. Also, the original plan calls for the toilet to be 16" off of the finished floor to accomodate the exterior black water system. (which we can't use) so the whole thing looks kind of wierd. Furthermore, the bathtub is WAY up high. To help with this we decided to elevate the entire bathroom with one 8 in step and

another 8" step to get to the toilet. There will be a taller step to get to the tub eventually. We made the bathroom step out of 2X8's and 3/4" plywood. The bathtub support is left over 16" TJI's from the framing of the house with 2X4's ontop to lift it another 3" and then 3/4 plywood for the tub to sit on.

Bathroom step

Temporary toilet placement

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Here's our tub surround at the very beginning. To the right is the toilet sitting in it's final position...WAY up there! This 8 inch step is built ontop of the 8 inch step in the previous picture. Below is the next portion of the tub surround: can wall.