Oscar rocks the wall.

Our trip to France inspired Oscar no end.  When we got back he immediately tore all of the horrible lavender-choking Morning Glory - which was only ever pretty for a month or so each year, suffering from drought induced wither or frostbite the rest of the time - off the tyres here...

...and built this excellent rock wall using rocks that are still hanging around from the excavation of the hut 9 years ago.

Jolly good, what?

Early summer 2011

It's heating up here now, and thankfully the awnings seem to be doing their job. Outside temperatures are getting up into the high 30s some days while inside we have had a max of 25ºC - warm, but nowhere near as hot as outside and quite tolerable. This photo shows the planter with the awnings down outside. The plants don't seem to mind the shade too much.
The changes we made to the grey water system (sending the kitchen and washing machine water straight out into the septic instead of into the planter) have worked brilliantly. The whole thing smells better - in fact, doesn't smell at all - the water is cleaner looking in the toilet, and there is no overflow whatsoever and no revolting grease trap to clean. We are immensely pleased with it. So, if you do decide to make a grey water planter, remember to divert the kitchen water straight out to the septic to avoid all that grossness.

We have also (finally!) put doors on all of our cupboards. It was the last proper building sort of job that had to be done, so I guess that means we have really and truly finished the house (in as far as it can ever be finished). Wow.

Outside our windows my flowers have all come up beautifully and are happily nodding away in the breeze with the bees busy about them. Happy summer (or winter if you are in the southern hemisphere) everybody!

Tweaking the ship.

It's been a while since I posted, but that's mainly because we haven't been doing very much work on the house at all. Just living in it happily over the winter. Of course, that doesn't mean there weren't things to be done and the good weather has brought out the builders in us and led to a flurry of tweaking.
The two main focal points have been the planter and the front face. Too much water in one and too much sun on the other. Solutions?
Planter: A three way valve off the internet to send the kitchen and washing machine water directly out to our outlaw septic (you should DEFINITELY do this if you haven't already, cleaning a revolting grease trap gets very old, very quickly) and a good old dig about to take a lot of the over-zealously applied dirt and replace it with room-giving gravel.
Windows: These lovely awnings which were installed on Wednesday and which have already kept the temperature at 22ºC today when it got up over 30ºC outside. Yay. We have also put summer shades over our enormous skylights to stop the heat coming through, the light is perfect for siestas over the coming summer.
Yay for us!

the earhthip style hut.

Over the years quite a few people have asked us for advice about the hut module that we built and lived in for five years. I will attempt to provide some answers for the most common queries:

First of all, it is a great idea to tackle a smaller project before committing to a huge house. We, as non-builders, gained invaluable experience, confidence and knowledge with this little project. It also gave us a place to live on-site as we worked on the big house for five years. This was good.

DIGGING IN
Our hut is five metres in diameter. We dug it in to the ground as far as we could but I would most certainly not do that again on our block. You really need to have rock-free, well drained soil to dig in. Apart from the back breaking work of sledge hammering boulders, we have always had a bit of damp on our below-ground level wall surfaces, which would be a royal pain in the bum if the walls were plastered, painted and susceptible to bubbling, but as they are mud, is merely a bit of ugliness that we learnt to cope with but would have avoided if hindsight were foresight.

LAYOUT
Inside the hut we built a semi-circular mezzanine out of old timber which became our bedroom. Of course this is fine when children are either non-existent or young enough to not mind sleeping next to you. An interesting fact: the attractiveness of a larger house with separate bedrooms grows in direct proportion to your offspring. The floor level had a small sofa, a dining table with four chairs, some wine-box bookshelves and a kitchenette with a fridge and work surface. Fine, but...

SPACE
Ours is a simple one room hut. In number three of the Earthship coffee table books, there is a plan for a hut with a greenhouse out front for the kitchen/bathroom area. If I could rewind and re-record, I would definitely build this addition onto the hut. It would have been a lot more work at the time, but I think it would have been worth it to have an indoor loo and a kitchen we could actually cook in. You see, one of the downsides to hot air rising and having a mezzanine bedroom is that everything you cook inside the single-space hut wafts up into the beds. Think curry pillow cases and fishy blankets. If we ever wanted to do anything other than boil water or make aromatic coffee, we had to scoot outside and cook on the BBQ. Oh yes, it's lovely in nice weather. So is strolling fifteen metres through the garden to your bathroom.

FLOOR
The floor is another thing I would like to mention. I don't know about American slate and slabs of paving stones, but over here, they are incredibly varied in size and thickness. We used lovely big black slate slabs and it looked gorgeous but NOTHING was ever level and it was maddening. In fact, once we tiled the big house, we ripped up the slate in the little house and replaced it with left-over ceramic tiles. So nice. So clean.

ROOF
Our hut was one of the ones that used a double rebar birdcage for the roof. I don't think they do that anymore, but I might be wrong. This is where we tied our rebar to the Ls that we had planted in the bond beam. It became impossible to stuff insulation between two bars tied to one post (yes, I know...duh) so there is a big strip of non-insulated roof. I think it would have been better to sink a double row of Ls with enough space for the insulation between them. We should also have used a lot more horizontal rebar to avoid the saggy-baggy-elephant look and make a prettier shaped dome. Speaking of rebar - and this was advice from Ted and Amy well worth paying attention to - you have to cover the metal with either paint or cement before plastering over it. The plaster eats at the iron and you can end up with big rust stains all over the place. We only have a tiny one thanks to the Dukes (and our own slightly-less-than-perfect cover-up job).

Still on the roof, we also included small vents into the air chamber between the two domes to allow ventilation and avoid condensation. They should probably have been a bit bigger, but they seem to do the job pretty well.

AND TYRES
Repeat after me:
All the same size...all the same size...all the same size...

Brighton Inspired.

It's Monday after an amazing weekend up in Brighton, UK. Earth Builds, Brighton Permaculture Trust and the Low Carbon Trust organized a conference celebrating 10 years of Earthships in Europe and asked me to go along and speak about our experience.
I enjoyed it enourmously and was so happy to finally meet other earthshippers and actually see my first earthship (other than my own of course) out at Stanmer Park.

But...did anyone take any photos?

Winter good, Winter bad.

Actually I think I'll go for the bad first. Weather induced bad. Just before Christmas we had our annual freeze and the temperature dropped to minus 4 overnight (I know it's not that cold, but remember, this is sunny, warm Valencia in Spain). All the animals' water buckets froze solid and there was a hard frost which did away with the more delicate outdoor plants. Our hot water system is on the roof, it is one of those solar heaters with a tank and a panel, and at about 2pm on the day of the freeze it started gushing water out of all the wrong places. The inner tubes had burst - apparently the installers didn't remember the anti-freeze - and there ended our hot water for three weeks. The company were very good, they replaced everything under guarantee but unfortunately it hasn't been sunny since and we still don't have hot water. Our back up system is the old bathroom which means quick dashes through the garden and a return to the days of no electricity. Oh well.
But wait! There's more. Last Thursday we were absolutely battered by the wildest winds I have ever experienced. This is what the street leading to our house looked like. We were lucky in that none of the trees on our block fell over. One lost a big branch and that's it. Oscar's parents' place was one of the worst. This is one of the five big trees that they lost.

I guess the bright side is that we now have firewood for the next 30 years, which leads me conveniently into the Winter good bit...
Nice huh? We love it. The earthship is not cold at all. In fact this winter the temperature in the coolest part of the house has not dropped below 16.5ºC. But, who doesn't love a fire? And the oven on top has been put to very good use already. Makes everything cozy despite the no hot water and crazy winds. The other good thing is the photovoltaic system. We have had enough electricity to see us through almost three weeks of grey. Four days autonomy has stretched into many more with careful use and the odd glimpse of sun. Very pleased with the whole system.

mercedes, new chickens and a broody american..

We had an avocado tree that had grown from a seed and was about as tall as me. Note the past tense. The culprit is in the background there, innocently munching on grass like she was supposed to in the first place. I was fortunate enough to have picked most of the best leaves off the basil to be frozen in readiness for the coming months before Mercedes decimated it too. Lucky she is such a sweetie, otherwise I might be tempted to listen to my father-in-law's espousing the virtue of goat at (or perhaps more correctly, on) the table.

We have a new clutch of chickens to keep the old boilers company. They haven't started laying yet but when they do we will have an absolute glut of eggs. If the broody american doesn't steal them. She has been sitting on her eggs for two weeks now and we found that she was stealing the other chook's eggs to add to her clutch. Oscar's dad came over the other night with a special light and we checked all of the eggs to see if there were actually any chickens inside them. Of the 12 she was sitting on, only two have chicks. No disappointment for me - who want's a hundred chickens anyway?

Searing temperatures, torrential rains and how we coped.

So! Our first summer in the earthship is coming to a close. It is still pretty warm here during the day but nights have cooled down enough to need a light cover on the bed. As you can see from the title of this post, Valencia has been subjected to some pretty extreme weather over the past few months. I was lucky enough to be in Australia for two of them and so missed most of the terrible heat, but Oscar bravely stuck it out. How was it, you ask?
Well, the design of our earthship has vertical windows as opposed to the sloping ones that you most often see. This was to ensure that the angle of the sun in summer would lessen the amount of light entering the house and therefore keep it cool. We also have 16mm climalit glass with a thermal coating on the inner layer. However neither measure is anywhere near enough to stop the heat of the sun hitting the glass and convecting in through the house during the long, torrid summer days. Our bedroom, which had little plant cover and no trees outside shading the windows, got up to 30º celsius (outside it was generally between 39 and 45ºC). We need blinds! I tried some old sheets when I got back from my trip and though they provided slight relief it really wasn't enough. The inner section of Carla's bedroom, which has a partition wall shading it from the light was the coolest room of all, but was still in the mid to high 20s. The skylights in each room (120cm square - huge things) were another source of heat and will also have to have their own little coverings. Of course we haven't had enough money to buy these lovely blinds yet, but they are a priority for the coming year. We just need to save about 4500 US dollars. Ho hum.

Towards the end of September we had absolutely incredible rains for about two weeks. The tanks filled up and overflowed on the first day it was so heavy (they were at about half capacity so that means in one afternoon we collected about 17,000 litres of water). And it just kept raining. At first there were no drips and I was well pleased but after about the fourth day water had wangled its insidious way into the roof and we had to have a few buckets and saucepans strategically placed around the floor. I think the main problem comes from the openeings in the roof. I suppose this is logical but I still can't understand where it is getting in. Everything seems to be tighly sealed. I do have a theory, but to prove it I have to dismantle the skylights and pull up sections of the metal roofing. Not something I am looking forward to but it will have to be done. Luckily the drips are only that, little drips. A more serious problem was that the outer wall in our bedroom grew a damp patch. It was about 2 metres up and about 50cm in diametre. How odd. Investigation revealed an enormous ant's nest dug right up against the wall into the earth berm which had simply flooded with all the rain, running the water up against the tyres and mud, though these are covered with a layer of plastic as per earthship instructions.
We have to fill the ant's nest and pile some more dirt on top.
The damp area has already dried itself out. This is the great wonder of mud wall coverings, they breath and dry so well, no peeling paint or bulging render. Phew.

What to do when you finish building your house...

Build a chicken house and coop in the corner of the garden (chickens to come).

Make much needed cupboards like you've been saying you would for months now.
Doors pending.



Build a bookcase to be filled with some of Carla's books.



Then re-plaster and re-floor the hut so that it people can visit!


And suddenly it's summer!

Oh my Goat...a Mercedes!

Oscar has wanted something to keep all the grasses and weeds under control for quite a while now, and I assumed he would eventually get around to buying a whipper-snipper or some such. Imagine my surprise when on Sunday last this arrived.


We have named her Mercedes and she follows us round like a little puppy, bleating when we disappear from sight. She still smells like baby goat instead of goaty-goat which is endearing. At two months, she is obviously far too young to have kids and give us milk, but we hope that in a year or so we will be having to milk her a couple of times a day and watching our grassy patches get mowed in silence.
Fingers crossed for the rest of the garden...