In this episode of Occupy the Land, we dive into our experimental earthbag dome build in the Arizona desert! We test PVC baseboards to shape our concrete floor, lay reinforced concrete thresholds, and prep earthbag walls to lock in doorjambs. Battling the heat, we share tips for staying cool, from jumping in the pool to using evaporative coolers. We also focus on flood-proofing with elevated pads and gravel layers as we gear up for the monsoon season. Join us for a hot day of innovative building and desert living!

Here’s the transcript:

Okay, this is baseboard. It’s PVC. It’s like plastic. You know, it’s the same stuff that your PVC. Irrigation pipe is made from. Now, this is an experiment. You know. Okay. What we’re going to try and do is we have their various different ways now on the workshop. We did the floor first. We did the concrete floor and then we.

It’s just temporary. Put the dome over it and the coverings so that we had a workshop. Now, this dome over here is going to go on top of the earth bags now. We haven’t decided yet exactly what the height is going to be, the phony wall. And it’d be at least four feet. And then as it starts to come up, we’re looking to get, you know, six feet of a flat wall now.

So we’re still experimenting, but this is different. We’re going to pour the floor after we get up, you know, past the height of the floor in the earth bags. So this is what we’re doing with it. Now, PVC, you can bend or you can use heat guns or heat it or just put it in freaking, you know, under black bags and get it so hot enough here in the sun that it’ll just, you know, bend and it can hold the shape.

So we’re experimenting with this. This is what we’re doing. Come over here and show this. This is the, threshold of the door. This is the reinforced concrete we got, you know, a grid, a metal grid in there, and so on to make this sturdy. Now, what we’re going to do is the floor that the floor is going to come up even with this.

And on the inside. Now when we have we separate out the gravel. We get a lot heavier gravel and so on that we’re going to spread out, you know, across this floor here. Then we put the mesh that’s over there that is going down, is really good at cutting that up to fit and so on. So it fit inside here then down here.

So we’re going to take this. And this would be our screed. You know we’re just going to go around and level this out now are probably going to bring the floor up a little bit. And I make it like 3.5in. And that’s 3.5in wide there. So we’ll have a flat floor that goes in here and we’ll be doing that at the end of the week, this coming weekend, we’ll go ahead and have the floor here, and then we’ll think about, when we’re going to do the interior part of the dome with the floor.

Now, what we’re going to do now is in between the doorjamb and this first overlapping bag that goes into the laundry bathroom. We’re going to fill in here and do the same thing on the other side. And that is so that we can store, heavier concrete on earth bags up against this, and it’ll create a, a wall that will cinch this in.

Now we do cleats, which is going to be, it’s like plywood. And then, two by four will go up here that go between the bags so that you have a wood area you can screw this jam into. And you do that every other run, you’ll keep going up the wall and this will get locked in. I mean, it’s going to be masonry and screwed in the door jamb ain’t going anywhere.

So we’ll go ahead and, start that process here. Once we get this next layer, a bag that goes on here, then, we’ll do the other outside the rest of the ring into the other door jamb, and then we’ll go ahead and be able to do a continuous run all the way around. Now we cut away the plastic that we had because this was below ground.

There’s about four layers of this that go down to provide a really strong footer. And this is concrete. You can see kind of concrete, cement coming through there. And we just put the bags over it because we wanted to make it to where it was, sealed underneath. Now, we did the bathroom differently. We did it all with gravel.

And then the earth bags that we had here. Going around the bathroom is almost pure concrete. So, And that’s for concrete. So this is just two different ways we wanted to see which worked better, how much we had. This is an experimental, dome here. Now, the you’ll see this, chicken wire stuff that we just had laying out here in the desert.

We just repurposed and just kind of wrap them around. That would hold the plastic up. And we did a cement base at the bottom of all of those, and only about an inch or two thick, just to try and have a strong base. But it was also for rodent control. We didn’t want where the wire and so on.

We just heard that, you know, over a decade or so, they’ll start turning into, you know, mouse condos or something. So we wanted to make sure that we prevented that a little bit. So we sealed it in concrete underneath. So this is, where the height of the bathroom floor is going to go to here. And then I’m hoping that I can get it to where it kind of slopes and drains to the shower drain.

So if there’s any flooding or I just want to hose it off or something, it’ll just go to the drain. We’ll see if I can work that out. Now, this over here, you can see it’s hard to tell. Standard Stone right there. This down here is probably at least 18in to 2ft above where the base of these bags are.

So as we have the rains and we’re controlling the water, and this eventually goes down to our sand planters, like 3 or 4 of these, that we are managing the water that falls here when it does rain. And what we’re doing is making sure that this doesn’t flood because this is, you know, if there’s any chance of flooding a lot of the places that we are, this will be it.

So we had to raise the pad up. We kept piling up dirt and gravel and dirt and gravel and, finally got to where I’m feeling comfortable about this now. That’s why, you know, Donna was, you know, wondering about this. Is that the door here that’s going to come in from the patio area back here, this door as it goes in, it’s going to step down a little bit here.

But I wanted this built up because I didn’t want should there be a flood. And I just gotta tell you, when there’s floods and floods, flash floods and flooding flood, it can flood. But I don’t think, just do the topography of the land and the way it’s, demonstrated where the water goes here. And we have in the last year, we’ve had one good actually filled the wash rain one and it wasn’t it was a good rain.

But I don’t think I’m going to have anything to worry about. But I wanted to have this threshold a little bit higher so I didn’t have to worry about it. I don’t want to have your flood waters kind of neuron coming in and don’t worry about it. So this well, probably one more layer here and then two layers here will be mostly cement.

And these bags. Then we can go to the regular Adobe and make a little structure to go maybe 5% Portland cement. But that will be, you know, fine. This is how this stuff is supposed to be there, you know, because we’re new to it and I’m, you know, kind of nervous. Want to last a long time. We went heavy cement because we had the bucket.

You know, the way that we’re doing the mixing with the tractor and so on makes this a lot less, manual labor, you know? So we’re doing well. So this is where we’re at now. And we finally got the the drainage and the plumbing and the septic all done and set in. And now it’s just some mat and concrete.

Now these baseboards, this is an experiment also because you can’t screw them in and or take them out because you with the concrete there, you can’t get the screws out to take them out. So what we do is we take the laser level, we get it, you know where we need it, pack it, put gravel up against it, get it kind of set, and, you know, it’s the right height and all level.

And then when we start pulling these out, we can just drill a little hole and, a screw into it and grab it and just pull it out. We hope if we can’t and you just leave it in there, it doesn’t really matter. But you know, I’d like to reuse these and pull these out. And I think we’re going to be able to do it.

When we did the other one, the, chloroplasts that we have, released pretty well. Now, the reason you see a bunch of dust on there is that we oiled it, you know, and it got dust on there, which probably helped release the old to the concrete anyway. So we’ll go ahead and finish this out around, you know, before we, do the actual pour.

But we wanted to see if we could do this and get this to where we can street level. And this is a lot thicker than probably what we need or want. So we’re going to take the coarse gravel that we, separate with our, screen that’s, over there and that screen over there. We can separate out the soil and get the rocks that we need, and we’ll put the mesh steel mesh over it, and then we just start mixing concrete and start pouring.

Now it’s usually for every inch you multiply that times two feet. So it’s like four inches. Then that’s eight feet. You know before you would put an expansion joint or something. So it looks like we’re going to be able to do it and no more than three pours, but maybe two. We’ll put expansion joint here and we’ll pour this.

And then we pour that. And Don and I got a big giant education on doing that for that, workshop floor. So we’re going to go ahead and, I mean, how how much can you mess it up as long as you keep going out waiting for it to set, you know, and we got it down pretty good that we can do it.

But that was when it was a lot cooler. So now it’s a lot hotter there. It is some retarding agents that you can put in to slow it down. But you know we’ll see. We get to we’ll get to that point and we’ll make a determination. So what we want to accomplish today is we want to get this first run here and on this side of it, so we can start locking in this door jam after it gets up to a certain height.

Then we can start taking these support structures off and then this inside this is just to support the outside. These are 12in. These are ten inches. Now over there we had 212. But what we’re doing is this inside is to support the outside. Once we get this, all, you know, and and solid, then we unscrew this inside and it comes out.

Now, you got the wood door jamb that you just slide. It’s measured to 38 a quarter right now. This one is 32.25. For the inside to have a 30 inch door that’s 38.5 or something for a 36 inch door. Now, we’re probably going to do the 30 inch. I think we’re going to go smaller for the outside door over here.

But, we got the wood for that. And I think we’re going to do the same thing here. Be 12in and with the ten’s on the inside. So that’s what we’re our next mission. Of all the other stuff that we got going on and doing is that we keep plugging away at this so that we can start building up the walls and get the floor in, and then things will start going a lot faster, because once we do the cement for the floor, then it’s just, you know, putting bags up.

And one of the things a concern is, is the bucket only goes so high, I mean, it’ll get up to here and so on. Now we have a mixer that we got, a poly barrel cement mixer that Donna can do by herself. Or we could do little projects, or we’ll add in to where maybe we can’t get the tractor, you know, right here to do.

There’s a couple places right over here that the tractor is going to be difficult to get to without running into walls and so on. So we need that little one for small areas that we might be able to do that. So that’s what we’re working on. And and it’s hot. But you know as long as you because my neck feels this is the perfect area here, it’s very cool.

And if it wasn’t for that, I mean, you know, not going to make it, you know, Donna, what’s, you know, how long do you go before it’s too hot? You got jump in the pool? How long do I have? I mean, when I get overheated, I just need to cool down so I can just. I just jump in with my clothes and get out, and it’ll keep me cool.

Which is what we used to do. Our home in North Phoenix. And we had a couple acres that, we had to work the land and doing all our projects and playing with our aquaponics and square foot gardening and chickens and all that kind of stuff. And our grandchildren come over and help, and they got they got rule ified.

But, it’s been, very, very convenient to be able to bring your core temperature down, because if you can’t, you know, just jumping in the pool, throwing water, man, you you die. I mean, I’ll just say I’ve had heatstroke before. When you start kind of feeling like you’re just behind on your water, even though you’re drinking way too much, you got to get your core down because you can only sweat so much, you know what I mean?

But yeah, it’s it’s, you know, it’s very important to get your core now in the evenings when it gets down, you know, it’s nine, 10:00. Then the temperature starts dropping pretty fast. Now we have an evaporative cooler that we have and one of the windows on the bus. And that evaporative cooler works really well. I mean, you get some fans.

We got like two fans in there and evaporative cooler. We’re fine. And especially we got, you know, all the solar we need during the daytime. So it just runs. We don’t care as long as you got enough water to feed it. Now the it’ll go through what a day. 30 gallons. Yeah. Maybe 3040 gallons a day if I, if we leave it on we don’t we don’t leave it on at night.

But, during the day. Yeah. Once it gets to where it’s cooler outside than inside, we just turn it off. We just have a few exhaust fans going in, and now you kind of manage it a little bit, and mainly so you can sleep. I just, I work out the heat all day long. Jump for the pool, whatever.

The homie wants to sleep. Now it gets to where if you’re, you know, you know you’re hot when your sheet is totally soaked. You know you got to lay on a towel or something. You just sweating. But with the fans blowing on you, you’re doing pretty good. That all changes during the monsoon when the humidity gets so much that it can’t lower the temperature with evaporative cooling.

That’s the misery index here in the desert. So you have more fans blowing sun. I’ve we’ve lived in Arizona adult lives and you know, it’s just get over it. But there are, machines that you can have your heat pumps that we have in mind for this. And, you know, we may do so we thought we were going to be in the dome by at least July, August.

So then it would be I don’t I doubt that’s going to happen. But what we’re going to do for the bus to keep us cool, we’ll see. But I Donna last summer she was traveling in Northern America when, you know, visiting her mother and hanging out with our daughter and her family. They were traveling up in, I need a, you know, hurry.

And right now, Porcupine Freedom Festival is going on at Pork Fest. All my friends are there and everything. And I remember, you know, it’s now. Oh, at night, man. You need to have your hoodie. Where’s the fire? But I’m going. You not here, I be hot. So as long as you manage your core temperature and it’s hot and I’ll get over it, it’s Arizona.

But the rest of the year, it’s just freaking awesome, you know? And if you can, you know, get your mind right and set and take care of your core temperature in the desert during the summer, which the pioneers did. I mean, you know, and then there’s ground cooling. There’s a lot of other things that we’re going to be experimenting with, but we need to get this done.

So let’s get on it. Peace.

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Earthbag Dome Dreams: PVC Baseboards & Desert Experiments!https://t.co/I3G3RL1IsA

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