Miles City, Montana Day 5

June 29, 2009 from chromasomatic.com

Today I took a minute to notice that the Earthship build team are a group of people that can each, individually, build an entire house on their own. They all move from digging holes to pounding tires to carpentry to masonry to plumbing to electrical. Normally on a construction site in the US, you will have specialists in each of those trades come in and do their small part. That creates gaps in time where the house is just sitting there for days or weeks waiting for someone to do their job because no one else can do their’s until it’s done. Talk about inefficiency…

Today was a dirty day, it rained, so all the dirt became mud and we were using a lot of concrete. We also had a couple of unfortunate events. We were rushing the can wall form in order to pour the bond beam and had two separate collapses. Both fell the full height of the tire wall and the second one grazed Mike’s ear. We used plywood screwed to the firewall to act as the form where the blowouts occurred and re-poured the bond beam in that area. You could tell some of the crew were not happy, but it wasn’t a big deal. We fixed it and moved on.

Brian worked for a good portion of the day on the wood forms for the concrete buttresses and they really came out nice. Pretty impressive looking for temporary forms I say. As a self taught carpenter myself, I can really appreciate good work when I see it, so hats off to you Brian.

Today was another manual labor day for me, just shoveling dirt and hauling wheel barrels of concrete around the site most of the day. Between that and working in the rain soaking wet for half the day, i passed out for about 5 hours the minute i got back to the campsite. Next week should be really interesting cus we’re gonna get some roof action going on. Stay tuned…

Close up of tire wall with "pack out" and bottles