In this episode of Occupy the Land, we brave the Arizona desert heat to kick off our earthbag construction for an off-grid dome! We share survival tips for 110° days, from long sleeves and electrolyte drinks to cooling off in our above-ground pool. Watch as we start building earthbag walls around doorframes, level the bathroom-laundry room floor, and prep for the upcoming monsoon season. Join us for a glimpse into sustainable building and desert living as we work toward 3D-printing our dream home!

Welcome to occupy the land. Occupy the land, dawg. Now, what Donna was showing is these, methods by which we don’t die out here in the desert. It’s really dry in Arizona. You get, except during the monsoon. Now, that’s when it becomes uncomfortable. When it says, feels like, you know, it’s 110, but it feels like it’s only 100.

You know, I kind of think, well, what happens is because it’s so dry. This is this is a good little piece of information. You visit Arizona the summer a lot of times, especially kids when they go to the resorts and so on, the water parks and all that. They get sick. And the reason is, is because they go into the water, they’re enjoying themselves, they get out, they want to go up to their hotel room kind of thing.

And because it’s so dry, it evaporates really fast. You’ll see blue lipped little kids and 110 degree weather with towels over them shivering. And the reason is because the water evaporates so fast. And God forbid you go inside where there’s air conditioning. Are you going to the hotel lobby and up that elevator and into your room and everything?

And they’re freaking freezing. So it’s it’s interesting in comparison to a lot of other places around the country. The most miserable summer I have was a couple of weeks in Des Moines, Iowa. One, summer, because it was just so humid. Like you had a warm blanket or you could never get away from. So in Arizona, even though you see 110, 120.

Yeah, kind of sucks. But if you got a hat. And that’s why a lot of times I’ll wear long sleeve, short. Donna, she just hands. Yeah. She don’t care, you know, I don’t know how she does it, but, for us, we wear these things. They have different vest that you can have cool packs, all kinds of cooling.

Construction workers here. Now, the technology is such that they, you know, have circulating, water cooling pumps kind of mean. So you don’t die. But we’re very conscious of the heat. So when we’re outside here now, we we have, a lot of wind here. So oftentimes canopies or umbrellas are not as effective, but we have, a umbrella to a picnic table.

Umbrella with a stand out there. If we’re sitting in one place, we may have that to keep us the sun directly office. Now we come out. Donna especially comes out early in the morning prepping. Do a lot of stuff, but we have a lot of responsibilities for our sites and everything and shows early in the morning. So it’s a lot of times it’s midday or later in the afternoon that we do a lot of the work.

I do. I out here until dark often, you know, because I do a lot of my work in the afternoon. But the main thing is the length of the days. You get 14 hours or something, plus some, daylight in the summer is when you get a lot of the work done, like I did, you know, last year that’s, you know, summertime now in the winter, because the days are so short, you know, you’re waiting for it to warm up.

But, you don’t get as much done as you do in the summer just because you got more light, even though it’s more uncomfortable. So, yeah, just embrace the suck and you just work it out and you do it now. Donna got her above ground pool that she’s responsible for. That’s her thing. But it’s nice to have. So when you get, you need to get your core down.

We’ll go and just jump in the pool and cool off. And before we go to bed, Swan. Now at night, it gets down. Probably except for maybe 5 to 7 weeks out of the summer, the evening temperatures drop below 80. It’s in the 70s, and oftentimes it’s in the high 60s. So when you wake up in the morning before the sun really starts hitting you, you know, you could be, having a blanket on or at least a, a sheet on.

Yeah, up until like 9:00 in the morning. So if you’re familiar with how the desert works and the dryness here, it really is not that bad. Even though it says 110. And if you’re out and you’re keeping cool and moist and doing work and you don’t, and lots of water, I’ll go through 2 or 3 of these a day, and then we have electrolytes that we do, you know, that keep our chemistry right.

And then you know, you know, it’s got some coffee, you know, leftover from the morning. So we’re going to go ahead and do some little things that we have to do some earth bags to start building up around the doorframes. And we’re going to be leveling out for the poor of the floor in the bathroom laundry room area.

So I’m not sure we’ll get to actual pouring of the cement, the concrete floor, but we’ll get ready for it and probably be doing that Friday, because tomorrow we got some radio shows and so on. So you got to work everything around your life now. We spent a lot of time in, cleaning up stuff and getting organized.

There’s so many other projects that we have to get ready for the monsoon. When the monsoon comes, all the rain you get, like, go out on the seven, eight inches a year that you get, you know, it’s like more than half of that comes in about a month. So if we have that ready, we can start accumulating this now.

A past video you saw that we have access to water. We have, oh I don’t know, probably a couple thousand gallons of, IBC totes worth of different water we have for drinking and water that we have for construction and that kind of thing. But we’re not doing any animal husbandry or gardening yet. We’re gonna need lots of water for that.

And that’s what we’re prepping for. The diversion of the water going into the, Sam Pond, and then we’ll be able to pump that.

there. It’s a process that we’re going to go ahead and take you on with us. But today is we got to do some earth bagging and the heat of the sun.

You know, the cameras don’t like it. And also, we’ll see what we can get and we’ll show you how we’re doing. The earth bags. It’s like 3D printing a house. So we’ll go ahead and show you that. And, staying cool. Now, the sun is a thing in the middle of the day. Donna comes in, does a lot of the computer work and so on.

Well, I stay out here and, you know, because I, I wear a hat and long sleeves so I can do it as long as I keep drinking water, you know? Yeah. Donna can’t stay on the long sleeve thing, but here we go, pace.

List of links:

Desert Days: Earthbagging and Monsoon Planning!https://t.co/NHLP7Axf2I pic.twitter.com/met19hTIy0

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