Ventilation Tubes Installed

10" metal culverts are used to bring fresh air into the back of each room.

The culverts are angled away from the house to prevent water penetration

We used 45 gallon drums (complete with mosquito netting!) as air intakes for the culverts.

 

The culverts will be completely covered by the berm and the drums will be above the berm to allow fresh air to enter.

 

 

  

Our First Crack at Concrete Work

Sometimes the tires don't exactly line up so we have to bridge the gap with metal lath and pour concrete to fill the gap.

 

The left-over concrete can be used as "packing" to fill the space naturally created by the tires' circular shape.

Used soda cans (cheap!) can be used as filler material to minimize the concrete (relatively more expensive) required.

First Row of Tires Done!

In the village!

Our local watering hole is in Maynooth at "The Arlington". We have become regulars and have gotten to know lots of people in and around town. Everyone is super nice and like minded!

So Adam decides that he would like to host Karaoke at the "The Arlington". So once a month the three of us end up there singing and being sung to:

Everyone get's into it!

Our first tire!

We spray painted in the lines where the tire walls will go and we set down our first tire!

WOO-HOO!

Then we pounded our first tire!

And then Adam and Dash did a bunch more! I hear it is labour intensive work... I am in the city so I get to do all the computer work - :) !

And then we did a bunch more!

Conduit Pipes

We change the simple 2U survival model a bit to add in extra storage space by making the bathroom and shower Us deeper. Adam put all our changes as well as the location of kitchen, sinks, and rocket mass heater into a solid works drawing.

Next we started building the conduit pipes. These had to be burried in place according to where we expect each of the utility lines to go.

We needed to bend some of the pipes so we used what we got. Fire works surprisingly well.

We laid down the conduit and then proceeded to mark where we need to dig and bury.

Once we finished burying the conduits we tamped it all down with the tamper.

That's it the site is ready for building on!

The guys decided that we need to put in conduit (chases) for running water lines, wires and cables.

 

Yellow are possible future propane lines. Currently we have no plans for propane but we are just putting them in case we need them.

Blue are for possible water lines where we might want to pump and pressure to the house's water sources.

 

Pink lines are for electrical wires and cables.

We also rented a tamper to both tamp the gravel down for the whole build site and to retamp where we dig to bury all the conduit.

Woo-hoo! Gas powered tamper.... Life is so much easier with oil!