Life in an Earthship
(Page 2 of 4)
April/May 2005
By Ellen Craig
Most of the heavy work on the house was completed within the next 16 months. Fortunately, I was able to take advantage of the warm summer weather for construction because that’s when I had time off from my job teaching high school physics, math and electronics.
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I worked on the house every step of the way, but decided early on to hire out some of the work to professionals, including excavating the site, building the roof and applying the exterior stucco. I also hired a crew of former students to help build the tire walls. I’ve done as much of the rest of the work as possible, including building the house’s interior walls, and designing and installing the electrical system.
That first summer, I supervised the work as the site was leveled, and then the students and I began building the walls. Tire walls are best built by putting the larger tires at the bottom and decreasing the tire size as the walls get taller. I spent several days at the dump with a rented truck picking through heaps of wet, dirty and heavy tires, looking for the correct sizes.
The next step was to fill them with dirt: It took a crew of five about eight weeks to pack and level the tires for the first 1,100 square feet of the dwelling. I purchased a construction-grade transit to accurately measure the angles of the walls, and as a result, the completed walls vary no more than a quarter inch over a 100-foot span. The carpenters who built my roof were impressed. According to them, “stick frame” walls built by professionals are frequently much less flat.
With the roof completed, the garage doors in place and a temporary door on the side where there would eventually be more house, I moved inside. For the next 10 months, I lived without running water or electricity. The “kitchen” was a piece of plywood on two sawhorses with a 2-gallon water dispenser at one end and a two-burner Coleman stove at the other. I loved the dirt floor (no cleaning!) and the portable toilet (someone from the construction crew cleaned it and brought toilet paper)
Inside the Earthship
The house is now 3,000 square feet, including a 720-square-foot garage. The rooms are huge: A living room, dining room and kitchen are combined as one large room; the other rooms include a bedroom, bathroom, control room (with batteries, water storage, etc.) and utility room. The house was designed so that it could easily be modified to include two more bedrooms and a bathroom
During the excavation of the site, we came upon some large boulders that weren’t going anywhere without heavy explosives. Fortunately, they were along the north side of the house where they could separate the kitchen and the living room. I opted to leave them, doing away with the wall that had been planned there, and instead installed a post and beam for structural support. Now, I’m quite glad we left the boulders intact. Everyone who visits admires them, and my cat loves them, too!
