Storm’s Coming: Earthbag Dome Progress & Drainage Checks!

In this episode of Occupy the Land, we brace for a late monsoon storm on our Arizona desert homestead! We take the tractor to check drainage channels and ensure our sand pond is ready to capture floodwaters, while raising the dome’s platform to prevent flooding. Inside the utility dome, we plan electrical outlets and lighting, experimenting with conduit and wiring options. We also haul water to prepare for potential road washouts and cover the dome with shade triangles to stay cool during work. Join us as we balance dome construction, monsoon prep, and creative desert living!

Here’s the transcript:

Welcome to occupy the land. Occupy the land, dawg. Well, kind of a late monsoon. It’s pinky swear going. It’s supposed to be, storm in this afternoon. I’m going to go ahead and take the, tractor and go out and check our drainage. I did that yesterday. I had some extra time and, you know, puttering around and, so I’m going to go ahead and, you know, hit all the areas and make sure that it’s going to be flowing the way we want.

But I may get a good test over the next couple of days. It’s supposed to rain like heck. So we’ll go ahead and see what happens. I’m interested. And, the drainage for a lot of the building sites that we have, how much higher we have to go with the platform, the pad, and, we are up a couple of feet for this dome here, and I think we’ll be okay, but we’re going to find out today.

This is, a lot of people have been let me know I have family around the country and so on is hey, man, it’s you’re going to get flooded, you know how how’s that going to go with you? You know what? Say I’m going. Yeah. Pinky swear all the time it’s supposed to flood, but, I think we might get some this time.

And we are really starting to hammer out, this dome. Now, we’re at the point to where we need to start, looking at where the, outlets go, you know, we’re going to be go ahead and getting, you know, probably about 16in from the floor up. I didn’t want to get it too low. You can go as low as like 12in to 16in, about maybe more like 20in or something.

Because I’m old man now. We’ll be reaching. Wait, why? I got reached down there. There’s water and stuff down there, I don’t care. So we’re going to have it a little bit higher then, the light switches. What kind of LED lighting? We’re going to do. What? We’re going to have outdoor outlets where we’re coming in with. There’s so many things that we just don’t worry about because it’s not time to worry about it, you know?

You got to do it. Now’s the time to do it. So then we have to decide how high we’re going to go with these walls. You know, this is, about 16in up. This is, what, five layers here. And then it’s like another 3 or 4 that went down into the ground and, as the foot or so.

And then we poured the concrete floor after. What we’re going to do is probably, have the electrical box. It’s going to go right behind me here and, see, I you have 12 now, see here in the bathroom laundry area. And we’re going to go ahead and run the lines. I was thinking of going over the doors and around, but it looks like I got a groove on.

I’ll show you later. You know, being able to do that, do I just do it in row Max, or do it, you know, was, three wire white cabling stuff that you use in residential, but I have conduit, and I can put it in conduit. I’m not sure I want to do it in conduit, but if you do conduit, then you can run other lines later.

And that’s, you know, good for, you know. Well, I guess I can just run Cat6 Ethernet, but you’ll think technology changes. I mean, it’s always changing. So then you have security lines and LED lights and going to the video. So do I do conduit I don’t know. We’ll see. But I’m going to be running lots of wire to make sure I get what I want.

And the accent lighting, the outside, we’re going to experiment a lot of things. I got little napkin drawings of, you know, felt pinned on index cards, kind of, you know, kind of get an idea because I don’t want to limit myself. I don’t want to get all carried up and make sure you have the hard core.

Exactly. Because it’s organic. It changes with the terrain. And depending on the rain. Here where I got this porch area here you had the tree and then this kind of area here. I might put a hot tub there and, have this is kind of a common area for this particular home. We have 18 acres, you know, each one of the sites that we put and then the tree that’s behind me over there, there’s probably going to be a, outdoor shower and bathroom and so on for guests or out here.

So it just you start one place and it just kind of grows from that. And with that comes from experimentation and different building, building techniques. Because I may want to put a, balcony up here. I got an area where I can put a balcony, and there definitely is going to be a shaded area patio that kind of goes around it.

So there’s so many things, and we have a lot of different building techniques that we’ve done before and we won’t experiment with. And that’s what’s going to happen here because the dome over there, you can take out the center of those hubs and you take those conduit and you can embed the doors in it, the windows, you can do all kinds of different thing we’ve done before.

And it’s just your imagination. I mean, it’s just being creative. We have the stamp press. I can just punch out whatever size. I just, you know, measured on my forearm. I go about that long, you know, boom, punch it out, put it up and done. You know, it’s really that simple. And it’s that is what we wanted to do.

We wanted to make sure that we had something that you can customize. You can change on the fly, that you can just add to like this. Bathroom laundry room that we did here. That wasn’t part of the original plan until we started to see how cramped we were going to be. We could put it here in the 22ft dome, but I go, yeah, screw it.

I want to have room. I won’t be able to, you know, we can do laundry and, store some stuff. And then we have a loft up here. So we’re just doing it because we can. So we’re taking you along on that. Well. Oh, the wind’s starting to pick up. Yeah, fine. We get us a good storm lock because the monsoon lasts for days, weeks, and it’s just.

Man, fill my Sam pond up and freaking one storm. Well, it hasn’t done that yet, so year, year and a half. Well, just over a year that we’ve been here. We bought it a year ago. March. It’s now September. We got on the land probably. Well, I got started working out here in the summer, like July, 4th of July, you know, in, 24.

And now, it’s 25. So it’s been like a year really working the land. Oh, here comes the wind. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, here we go. All right, well, I’m going to go out and play with my tractor. And then if there’s a lot of rain event and so on, I’ll share it with you. I’m having some fun.

Peace.

So I had to get a couple of loads to water today. Our property is about 7 or 8 miles from where we get the water at this agricultural well, and we have a storm, a pretty strong storm system coming up from the south, and it could hit us at any time. And those waters will fill up really fast, and you won’t be able to get through them.

I mean, you probably could, but your, you know, you probably end up getting stuck. People get stuck out here all the time in the wash. And so when it rains, it’s just best to be prepared. Fortunately, we can just come and do this all the time anyway. But, sort of forced had to do it today just to make sure we had enough on hand for this week.

So I just got finished covering this dome with three arch triangles, and it didn’t cover the whole time. But for the most part it’s shaded inside, which is really the goal was to get this shaded in here so that when we work in the afternoon, we’re not in the sun.

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