And checking for level using the big 6-foot level. It’s always nice when you can get it right in the sweet spot like this:
Making sure that the bags are all flat and even the length of the wall:
And, lastly, the final, fully tamped foundation:
I just wanted to make a clarification about what I was doing with the contractors plastic, since Kelly Hart (well-known earthbagger) made a comment about it in my last post. The plastic does not completely wrap the earthbags - it covers a little over half of them. Basically it separates the earthbags from the rubble to prevent wicking, and then comes up the outside and wraps about halfway over the top of the bags, under where the 2x6 plate will go. On the inside it just lays flat and extends out about 5-inches under the gravel. Thus, about half of the earthbags are not covered in plastic and will be able to breathe/dry out if they get wet. In one of the photos from my last post the plastic is pinned up on the inside of the bags, but that was just temporary so that I could clean out the inside a bit before laying the gravel. I unpinned and lay the plastic flat before putting the gravel into the middle. Hopefully this isn't too confusing, but I didn't get a good photo of it before the gravel went in.
Anyway, the next day, my friends Deb and Miko came back over to help for the morning, and we went to the garden supply yard to get some more volcanic gravel. It’s a fun place to go, since the guys who drive the front end loaders are surgical with those things - its really amazing to watch. They load tons and tons of gravel/dirt, and not one grain of it makes its way onto the pavement... This is what one cubic yard of volcanic gravel going into the back of a pickup looks like:
We took the gravel back and wheelbarrowed it to fill in the area enclosed by the earthbags. It will be the subflooring for the polished adobe floor, providing a solid flat surface, good drainage, and a measure of insulation (because of all the air gaps trapped in the volcanic rock). Here's Miko and Deb (looking very serious) after we've finished spreading it:
Deb had to go to class, but then Miko helped me prepare the windows for the rest of the afternoon. The windows were salvaged out of a house nearby where the lady who owned the house decided to replace all her windows, and then just a year later she decided to level the whole house and rebuild from scratch. Some of the Magic folks went and salvaged all the very nice windows, along with a bunch of other materials, and have been storing them for about three years, waiting for an opportunity to use them. Then, I come along, and lucky me get to have my pick of many thousands of dollars worth of essentially brand new double pane windows, which is pretty cool.
I'm going to put in four windows (one for each wall), which is a lot of glass. But when you've got as many big, high r-value windows as you want at your disposal, why not? Here's a photo of the biggest window (4x7ft):
And here's Miko (looking like a sneaky ninja) cleaning up the second biggest window (3x6ft):
The other two windows are both 3x4 feet. Another thing to note is that the are vinly windows, which is a good way to illustrate the difference between green building and healthy/natural building. The windows are about as green as you can get (high r-value, double pane, locally salvaged), but they are not all that healthy/natural, since the frames are made from a plastic that can offgass and leach some pretty nasty stuff (phthlates, vinylic compounds, halogens, etc.). Fortunately for me, however, they have already been sitting around for about 4 years (1 installed, and 3 in the backyard of Magic), so they have probably done most of their offgassing/leaching. There definitely are some tradeoffs, but overall they are pretty sweet windows, and its pretty hard to complain when they are free and in such good condition.
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