Earthship construction: Day 3
Work started at 6:00 am when the temperature was still cool. The back-hoe was found with a flat tire which was quickly fixed. Tire pounding resumed with a sense of urgency and good camaraderie among the locals and foreigners alike.
The back-hoe was busy bringing dirt from the next Earthship site, for which excavation began yesterday. Mass quantities of earth are used in the process of tire pounding and burying the building to achieve the thermal mass quality of an Earthship.
Wine bottles were cut in half by an older community member, then cleaned and reassembled to form bottle bricks for interior wall construction. Brooke Rundle rounded up a legion of local children from the surrounding Carizal community and ventured into and through San Juan del Sur, cleansing the riverbeds and alley ways of all trash suitable for bottle bricks. Mike Reynolds spent a good portion of the day laying the bottle bricks in cement mortar on a concrete footing.
By the completion of the day, the wall was approximately five feet high and the arched openings they framed were starting to be defined. As the sun moved across the sky, light glowed through the freshly laid bottled bricks. Stained glass by any standards.
A water truck showed up to fill the two cisterns up half way so we could check the plumbing connections before they are buried in the berm of the house. In true Nicaraguan style, the water was unloaded by a bucket brigade, liter by liter. No leaks were detected so burial of the cisterns began.
By noon it was time to take a break and eat lunch which is being prepared by the caretakers of the land. It was a family affair and an opportunity to sit in the shade and practice Spanglish.
Tire pounding continued after lunch. By the eighth course of tires, the walls were high enough to capture a view of the ocean. As the wall got higher, the tire wall received its first “pack-out”, a process which consists of thick concrete thrown by hand into the crevices of the tires. The remnants of the cut bottles were then pushed into pack-out to take up space so a lesser amount of cement is used.
The remainder of the day was spent finishing up the tire work on the large room. 11 courses of tires and they are nearly complete.
Cervezas arrived, the crew cleaned up the site and we all looked back at the growing building and planned our strategy for the next day.
(Authored by Ted Elsasser, Earthship Foreman)
