If you're like me, you've never seen an excavation for an earth-sheltered house. Okay, I have now, but not until recently. ;) In fact, you may not know anyone who lives in an earth-sheltered house. It's not exactly underground, but all but the equator-facing side is buried.
We have hired Conrad's Castles, of central Texas, to build our new home. There is a great book out there that tells you how you can build your own earth-sheltered house, but let me tell you - it's a ton of work. Literally. Lots of heavy materials involved.
So we decided to outsource.
They pour patented concrete forms, and the roof is a monolithic dome. They can build the house right on the ground, but that takes a lot more dirt to bury it. If you can build into the side of a hill, which we are doing, it takes less dirt. It's cheaper and more efficient.
This photo and the next show Benjamin against the north side after our main earth-mover, Troy, started digging the area. He has a small bulldozer which can only do so much. He got about three feet down and hit a vein of sandstone.
That could have been deep enough, but we would have needed to import a lot more dirt to bury it. However, because we are blessed and have favor with God and with man, the guy who manages the large property adjacent to us lent us "his" bulldozer guy for a few hours. For free. I'll tell you the whole story in a later post.
So in the next photo is Michael (in blue; my husband Jerry is the other guy) and his big bulldozer. When I took this photo, he had already started to dig up the stubborn sandstone.
The next photo shows Troy, in the cowboy hat, measuring the depth of the hole where Michael is standing with the measuring stick.
In the next two photos, Troy and Michael are talking about the next step.
After Michael got that chunk of stone out, Troy subsequently found another vein a day or two later. Michael came back and took that out, too. Again, for free! Instead of 2.5 to three feet, Michael and Troy were able to get the deepest point down to four feet - making it exactly level with the starting point at the bottom of the hill. Hallelujah!
What follows is a video I made of the leveled excavation site. It is 36 feet by 40 feet to give the construction guys at Conrad's Castles a wide birth to work in outside the perimeter. The actual concrete module will be 24 feet by 24 feet on the inside.
