(((So, I had a hard drive failure tonight, so rather than write a full volcano diary tonight, I'm resurrecting and updating something I wrote before to save time. Hope it suffices until tomorrow!)))
October, 2014. A massive lava eruption continues on the other side of the island, blanketing the capitol region in a low-level blue mist that just doesn't want to leave. For some people, like my ex mother-in-law who has only 49% lung function, it's seriously impacting her health. But for me, it's just more frequent headaches, sore eyes and the like - not usually enough to keep me from my land.
Stapagljúfur - "Mesa Canyon". 8,35 hectares in Hvalfjörður ("Whale Fjörd"), a patch of plains and mires, grass, moss and berries, steep canyon slopes and cliffs, ravines and brooks, and the river Miðdalsá flowing from the snowmelt from atop Esja and Sandfell. And all this is the site of where I'm working to build an underground eco-friendly tropical steampunk earth home.
A couple people have reminded me that it's been ages since I've written a followup. Well, that it has. Allow me to remedy that. Bárðarbugna junkies, you'll just have to wait for tomorrow for your lava-fix ;)
Let's dig down below the fold.
Architects. Just thinking about that word makes me want to hit my head on the wall.
I bought my land at the end of January, for a tiny fraction of its assessed value, thanks to the 2008 financial crash that's still affecting the country:
I just fell in love with the land... it's rugged and gorgeous...
... full of hidden treasures of all kinds
... and in an area with all kinds of natural wonders around it:
So of course I wanted to live there! The thought was of course, let's get well underway, right away! So I sought out and found an architect who took on the project. And while working with him, I worked on the land - buying fencing materials, pricing goods, buying and importing tools, tracking down free materials like wooden shipping pallets for windbreaks, etc.
Everything was moving forward... except for the housing plans. The architect never seemed to do anything. The only email of mine ever responded to was where I wrote "URGENT" at the top of it, which got a short reply. Yet whenever I walked in he was never so busy that he couldn't stop what he was doing to take an hour to talk about the project, which I found very strange.
He also never really seemed to "get" the project. He didn't get that I wanted to do as much of the work myself as possible. He didn't get organic shapes. He didn't get the concept of using natural materials or trying to minimize the environmental footprint. He didn't get the concept of structures that are inherently long-term durable because of a load-distributing shape. He wanted to design a regular boxy house with regular walls and then make it "cavelike" by filling the corners up with polyurethane foam and plastering over them, like some sort of Disneyland ride would do. He was really just a poor fit.
After three months of this and him doing nothing towards even a rough house plan, I had enough and fired him. It then took another month to find a new architect. In the meantime I built hundreds of meters of fence, repaired a kilometer's worth, and made hundreds of meters of windbreak, including in difficult locations, sometimes with help from my then-fiance.
As well as acquiring a bunch of cheap timber and tubing, and free windowpanes from my employer, who was changing out their windows:
(Later in the year, I managed to get even more, and now have several dozen). I also stopped often to chat with the neighbors about the project, including one stop where I helped him deliver a lamb.
... and he named a different one after me, one not destined for the slaughter. Of course, I stopped sympathizing so much with the sheep during their regular invasions of my land where they'd break through my defences to chomp my newly planted bushes and trees to the ground:
... and so I didn't exactly cry any tears for the interlopers during the roundup:
Anyway, back to late spring. While working with the previous architect, I had had the land rezoned with a different architect, who had done the zoning for the land previously. He had raved about my land during that time, and had mentioned that he had long had interest in designing a house for it. So I went back to him and started talking with him again. He's a total hippie and loves architecture that blends into the landscape rather than fighting against it. And he's totally into organic shapes, natural materials, and unconventional things in general. He doesn't just accept the project, but really seems to personally want to be involved in it. He pushed through the permit for me to be able to have a shipping crate on my land, which I purchased at deep discount after extensive online searching:
... which shortly thereafter got hit by what a neighbor described as "a tornado" and flipped 9 times in the direction of the road. Had it done so in the other direction, it would now be wrecked in the bottom of the canyon and require about $10k worth of crane rental fees to get it out. The neighbor felt bad, he had just told me days earlier that I don't really need to worry about anchoring it down, especially at that time of year ;)
My awesome neighbors gave me contact info for an excavator operator, who came and righted the crate, built it a nice platform and set to work on building a nice high driveway, just like I wanted. I found his rates quite reasonable - however, the amount of material needed for it was more than I calculated for, so the material costs were double his hourly costs. This drove home the importance of making sure during the design phase that material to be excavated for the house is roughly equal to that which needs to be set on top of it, I don't want to triple my excavation costs!
We talked about the water system with the excavator operator and my neighbor and agreed to make use of a spring on a mountainside on my neighbor's land. We bought the hardware for working on it, but then the excavator operator got busy with other projects and forgot about me for a bit (he even forgot to send me the bill ;) ). Meanwhile I finished up the fencing...
... and embarked on a heavy tree and shrub planting spree, planting several hundred (most of which I sprouted from seed) all over my land. Not just plopping them in a hole, but digging out the surrounding grass, remediating the soil with horse manure, and building each tree a little windbreak I still have nearly a thousand seedlings at home that I'm hoping will overwinter okay in their pots. I'm particularly concerned about my more marginal ones like the mountain eucalyptus species, dawn redwood, and bald cypress; the douglas firs, birches and the like could probably survive the winter dumped out of their pots onto bare concrete and left there until spring ;)
Meanwhile, the architect did... nothing. I had just left an architect because he did nothing and didn't respond to emails, and I had gotten another architect who did exactly the same thing! (okay, he responds to maybe 1 in 3 emails versus 1 in 8 ;) ). Three months, and nothing. He had other projects he had to do first, he went on vacation, always apologies and stressing how much he wants to work on the project.. but nothing. So, there went my plans to begin on the house in the summer - one is extremely limited on what they can do without formal approved house plans. Finally, I managed to get both him and my concrete guy in a room at the same time, and we could at long last have the meeting to constrain construction methods and design principles... Yeay!
So, how to turn this:
... into a cave home?
First, it was agreed that what we'll do is that after removing the meter or two (we believe) to bedrock and flattening the construction site, we'd lay the foundation. Then we'd have the excavator guy build the inner mold of the house on top of it out of earth. With a 32 tonne excavator, he should be able to make pretty quick work of even a big task like that, and the $150 USD an hour for all costs combined doesn't strike me as at all unreasonable, and it'll probably be a lot easier, safer, faster, and even cheaper than the previous idea of a timber mould. I'll do any fine sculpting with a shovel, then we'll build a wooden outer mould. The pozzolanic concrete will be cast between the earth and the mould. When it's set, the excavator operator will remove all he can using a little excavator($60 USD an hour) through the large gaps left for the picture windows on the south and west sides, and then it'll be up to me to get whatever he can't reach with a shovel and wheelbarrow. Once it's all removed, we'll use a high pressure sprayer to remove cement from the surface of the concrete so only the aggregate shows, leaving it cavelike.
One source of debate was over insulation. We all agreed that it'd be great to use pumice - an abundant, cheap, non-degrading renewable resource here - as insulation; however, we were not in agreement on where to insulate. Having read extensively about earth homes, I was aware that traditionally in the "umbrella" design one insulates above the house, extending out from over the ceiling, but not underneath or to the sides. My concrete guy (who my architect deferred to), with his many decades of experience with traditional above-ground buildings, felt we should insulate under and around the house on all sides; I was opposed to this on the grounds that the insulation is more effective overhead and you lose the earth as a heat store that way. We agreed to settle it based on whether I could find peer-reviewed research to back up my perspective.
I did, and sent several studies and books to him, as well as doing some simplified heatflow simulations of a simple scenario that proved the point. But then after I sent that, I started thinking about the more complex scenario, not the "house on the plains buried in uniform dirt" scenario that the studies and books usually looked at. The ground isn't uniform, there's wet areas (outside the waterproofing geotextile "umbrella") and dry areas (underneath it); dry earth insulates several times better than wet. There's bedrock, and bedrock conducts heat much better than earth, even wet earth. And then - contrary to the view that heat is only truly lost through the surface - when I included slowly flowing groundwater in the simulations, the situation changed. Normally, heat "lost" to the earth only truly goes away when it makes it to the surface, otherwise it's just stored (with decreasing flow rates the further from the house you go), and if you stop surface loss, you stop heat loss. But with groundwater drawing in heat and then flowing away, you effectively have another "surface" underneath you. Bedrock, with its high thermal conductivity, compounds the problem, drawing the heat effectively to the groundwater. So I sent him my revised simulations showing that the best results come from insulating both above and below, but not to the sides.
He was really pleased with how in-depth I'm researching the project and agreed with my assessment. We also are potentially going to do the house construction as part of a research project with a local agency.
There will also be a greenhouse built into this ravine:
The greenhouse roof will simply be built over it and walls placed along the short ends; the long axis will just be plain unmodified ground.
I have not heard back from the architect in the two weeks since the last meeting, when he said he planned to start working on the plans with his daughter, who also has a lot of interest in the project. He didn't respond to my last email. So we'll see where that goes.
Meanwhile, winter is approaching and we're trying to get done all we can on the land.
I'm working on getting an electrical connection to the crate (before it gets buried underground) so I'll have power for construction, as well as heat and more importantly light to continue limited work on-site during the dark winter. The power company was at first hesitant to connect power without approved architectural drawings, and they don't seem to like temporary connections; however, once I explained the situation, they seem to have changed their mind, and I plan to meet up with one of their workers on Friday.
I got my electrician down to the crate and told him about the situation. He took my electrical panel to wire it up, and I told him that I plan to paint and reinforce the crate so it can buried, so we can't have anything in the way of the dirt or reinforcements, and that I'd paint a spot for him to put the panel - which I did.
While I was out, he proceeded to install the panel on totally the wrong spot, meaning I have to change my reinforcement plans and leave that area unpainted until the house is built, weathertight and we can move the panel indoors. And by installing the meter outside the shipping crate where he did (far from the door and low down), I'll only be able to bury a fraction of the crate now - otherwise I'd bury the meter! I may just have to have the crate out in the open for another couple years, taking more weather damage, and possibly having to paint it yet again.
I'm nearly done with the painting, which took a lot more paint and time than expected due to the corrugations in the crate - it's not like painting a bedroom! Plus getting both inside and out, with stuff stored inside, and nooks and crannies everywhere, it was a big task. But the downside to using a low-cost crate as a storage shed is that it comes with rust, and if I don't want it to fall apart, fresh paint is essential. A couple more days and I should be done with the essential painting (I still plan to do some accent colors on the door and some ancient magical symbols on the back, but that's a "whenever I have time" task). Then it'll come down to reinforcement so that it can bear the load of the dirt. My plan has been to use heavy wooden beams, but a friend is trying to talk me in to welding some steel bars instead. If he's right about it being possible to rent a welder and if he can find a source of low cost scrap steel, I'll probably go that route; it'll take up less room in the shed and get me welding experience .
I've got half of the (very heavy, fragile) window panes into the shed, but I still need to get the other half (about a dozen and a half) before winter comes and they freeze in place. Meanwhile, the excavator operator is back to working.
He's set up a sand filter and drain, and we're getting excellent flow rates, over a liter per second.
I've never seen the spring dry; even in the middle of winter water flows on the surface under the snow:
... so underground it's surely even better. My calculations suggest that water pressure (gravity-fed) should be a healthy 6 bar / 85 psi; I wouldn't want any more than that! Yesterday I picked up a 3000 liter tank to install; it barely fit in my truck ;)
Hot geothermal water won't be coming for a couple years - but at least it will be coming. The city drilled a well into a large geothermal reservoir this spring but the flow rate was too low to make it useful. However, a couple rounds of pneumatic fracking later and the flow rate went from 5 to 20 liters per second and the temperature from 80° to 104°C, so it should now be enough to serve my valley.
So that's where things stand. I'm going to try to get cold water and electricity to the shed (right near where the garage will be) before winter, get the shed all painted and reinforced, everything loaded up into it, and maybe get it partly buried under. If for some reason the weather holds out long enough, I may start on the tree-sized hypertufa planters in the ravine where the greenhouse will be, but I doubt that I'll have enough time (although I could build the moulds this winter, if I get electricity before the ground freezes).
Hopefully - hopefully - the formal architectural plans will be done and approved by the spring thaw next year, so we can start immediately on the site. Hopefully I'll know exactly what materials will be needed with enough time before then that I can search for good prices on new goods and go on picking / recycling runs for used ones wherever possible. For example, I was thinking about heading over to Hveragerði this winter to see if any of the owners of damaged / disused greenhouses would be interested in letting me pay to disassemble / scrap them. And trips up north to look for farmers that own good hillsides of planar scree that I could use as flooring, or beaches of siberian driftwood logs that I could use for loft construction. One thing is for sure: I'll stay busy. :)
Now, back to your regularly scheduled volcano coverage!