Earthship construction: Day 9
Day Nine dawns, another bright and beautiful morning in El Carrizal, Nicaragua. The Earthship crew arrives and the Nicas are already at it. They bring out all of the tools for us every morning, which is great.
The building is starting to really take shape, highlighted by the main room with it’s twin arched entrance and dome. The dome gets another coat of cement shaping today, by Rory, Phil and Seth. Ted and Demian work on the rebar arches for the front face, and are forming and pouring the columns. Lionel and Jose help them and by the end of the day, the columns are poured up to three feet, ready for can and bottle work tomorrow.
Amy and Lydia work on finishing up the bottle brick wall in the bedroom. Seth and Demian have gone to great expense and endured tremendous hardship to personally buy and empty two large Patron bottles for a special central bottle brick that Amy puts in today.
Chris (that’s me) grooms the bottle bricks in the main room. Jonah and Mike are working on the flying buttress can arch that will later receive the truss roof, connecting the main building to the front face arches. Justin begins work on the living room skylight with Fernando helping him. Justin, Fernando and Faustino also bent flashing for the skylight on a pile of lumber. No easy feat. Lots of packing out of the walls is still being done.
The tireless Nicaraguan crew are throwing loads of cement all day long, with Eliseo at the helm. He comes to me to borrow my hammer, my “matilla,” and he always thanks me in English…which sounds like “Sank You,” but hey, I’m pretty sure my mangled Spanish is way worse.
It’s another scorching hot day and Dave brings in some ice cold water for us. He pours some on me. Mike is loving the cold water. He and his helper, Marlo are a four-handed can laying machine. Marlo is a sweetheart, who everyone likes, although all of the Nicas are unfailingly helpful, friendly and polite. At one point in my day, my “cemento” has become a big hard unworkable mess. I ask the Nicas for help, and they’re quick to come and rescue me. Of course, I have lent out my fascinating cordless drill a lot…
After lunch, Seth and Phil started on forming the second bond beam for the bedroom dome. We don’t have enough cans to do it in that method, so we’re using scraps of leftover plywood to form it. Amy is trying to get the leftover cement off the bottle bricks, getting them ready to groom.
The Nicas are working on the long tire footing for the full length front face wall. Luckily, it’s only 2 tires high, since we’re short on tires now. Old Faustino has been working quietly in the yard, under the “ramada” making lots of nice bottle bricks. Tomorrow, Amy and I will start laying them in the spaces between the arches on the new front face wall. Amy, at 6′2″, will have a definite height advantage on this project, with me at only 5′4″.
After work, there is a lot of talk about “glomming,” which is a Mike-coined term that probably deserves it’s own blog. It basically refers to Mike’s tendency to be a somewhat casual builder (to put it nicely). Though in his own words, his description of the technique is “Let go and let glom.”
At the end of the day, we were visited by a bus load of Dutch students on tour hoping to catch a little extra cultural flavor. Word is spreading in San Juan and the construction site now appears to be gaining the recognition of a tourist attraction.
