Kitchen WallWelcome to our kitchen or at least the space where a kitchen will come to be. Both these walls are constructed out of compacted water bottle bricks and a earthen cement. The wall doesn't touch the rafters. We left about a 1 inch gap. We will end up putting a trim board along the ceiling and wall to seal this and give it a finished look. The first coat of mud packing material has been applied to both sides of the wall to the left. This is the same material that we used to mud pack the tires. We have noted though with this mixture if you don't add enough straw to it that it will crack. We do have some cracking that did appear but will be covered up with 2 more coats of a natural mud plaster. The other wall shows white blocks. This is foam to protect us from the metal bolts that are sticking out of the wall. We have a row of these bolts on the bottom and 2 rows on the top. We will be fastening a board to those bolts. This is what we will be fastening our kitchen and bathroom cabinets to. We did this because we don't know how well screwing the cabinets directly into the wall would work. Especially since cabinets are not light and will be holding a lot of weight. Would they hold with using the kind of material that we used? So to be sure that they will be safely secured the board will be in place for this. Again I am going to stress that thinking in advance for this kind of construcion is extremely necessary. Those bolts had to be mud plastered in as we built the wall. The same goes for the electrical. Which means we had to know exactly how high the cabinets are going to be the distance between the bottom and top cabinets in order to know where to put the bolts and the electrical outlet boxes. This is the corner of our kitchen wall and hallway that leads to the bathrooom and the master bedroom. The blue is conduit hooked up to the electric box. We will have bottom kitchen cabinets that will come out from the wall where you see the white pipes. In those cabinets will be a plugin on the end of it. so that is what the blue conduit is for the runs down the wall in a snake like fashion. The other one that goes up and is hanging will go to the ceiling for our ceiling lights that will hang over the kitchen sink and our dinning room table. The Start of our Bathroom The nice thing about building with dirt compacted plastic bottle walls is that you can use it to build a curved wall. Allen is starting the first row of our shower. The mud that Allen is using here is a bit stronger. We put extra cement and made it thicker by adding extra clay to it. Otherwise it is the same mixture as we use for the kitchen wall contrustion. This mud is similar to making a very thick mud pie. The reason for this is because it is the foundation for our shower wall. Because of the curve being difficult to make a wooden form for we decided to use dirt compacted gatorade bottles that were saved by Joanne Bailey of Willow Springs. With the size of these bottles it will take less rows and less bottles to construct this portion of the shower. As you see in the photo Allen is using a string tied to a metal stake to help in making a perfect curve for our shower. There is a mark on the string that Allen is using to put the edge of the bottles up to. The next photo below is going from the kitchen with a little hallway to the bathroom. The wooden frame is the door way opening to the bathroom. You see we have another curved wall that connects to the poured footing of our bedroom doorway. Where the insulation is is where the frame work for the bedroom wall that will have our door with windows and another bottle wall section. It is safe to say that any place where we are not going to put a window will be filled with glass bottle windows. Truly making this home a work of art in every room. The drain pipes for the shower and the bathroom sink have all been laid. They were actually the first part of creating our bathroom space. We had to have this in place so we knew where our walls had to be built When we built that hallway wall to the bathroom door we didn't know how we were going to put in the door way. Or at least we weren't concerned about it at the time. Well we had to put a plan together to make it work. It helps to have a innovated husband that can make just about anything work. This is one skill that is necessary when building a Earthship with no actual building plans to go off of. Allen used self taping cement screws to screw the left side doorway into the bottle wall that was already constructed. Allen did drill a small hole prior into the earthen cement. Allen said that the earthen cement is hard and solid but not as hard as concrete is. The screws went in nicely and the frame work is fastened solidly. The wall on the right side of the doorway was put up after we put the door frame in. We used treated wood for this door frame. You can see the drain pipes for the shower and bathroom sink. The pipe with the cap on it is for the toilet. All of the pipes will be buried in the floor. As you see the beginning of the floor being laid with the rock. In every room we build we purposely wanted to raise up the floor to prevent water and moister from the ground so it would not come up through the finished floor. We start this by laying large rocks down first then they get smaller for each layer placed on top. All rocks are from on site. The smaller ones come from when we sift dirt to use in our earthen cement mixtures. The other frame work that is up is to install the pipes for our shower head and water controler. We wanted to use a wood frame so we could get to these pipes in the event we ever had to. This frame work was built with treated lumber as well. We have a doorway frame up from our bedroom into the bathroom. The shower wall is to the right of that. We have one more row of compacted bottle bricks to put up before we will finish this wall with glass bottle bricks. We didn't have enough gatorade bottles to finish this part of the wall with. So we then used the small gatorade bottles then the water bottles. You can use different size bottles as long as they are the same legnth. And you want to put the bigger ones on the bottom and move up with smaller ones on top. The floor of the bedroom will come up to the bottom of the door frame. The floor in the shower has been started. The big rock is all covered with medium size rock and the small rock has been started. We have decided to tile the shower floor. The round white pipe is the shower drain. Part of the shower wall has been mud packed.
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It is a rare thing to have a photo of myself when I am the one usually taking all of the photos. I have to ask to have my picture taken. Many of you know Allen from following our blog. With Arron taking the photo this time. Mary is able to be a part of this blog in a new form. I insisted on my picture being taken because we are on scaffolding. I am not usually one that likes heights. Especially when walking on a narrow 2 x 10 board. We are focusing on the kitchen walls now that the exterior glass bottles are roughed in. The mixture is an earthen cement. It is the same mixture that we use for the glass bottle bricks. A combination of cement, sand, clay, and water. We lay out roughly a 3 inch layer of mud and then Allen putts in the bottles. Putting in the bottles is not as easy as it looks. I have tried it and it takes me forever to do it. Once the bottle is put in the mud it has to be leveled with it's self and to the bottle next to it. This is to prevent the bottle from slanting and in helping to keep your row level. The bottles also need to be leveled up and down as well. Otherwise by the time you get to the top you could have a slanted wall. Building with bottle bricks has been a really different experience. Allen learned a lot from when he put in the bottles for the bond beam. He took what he learned there and has been applying through trial and error on our kitchen walls. As long as you keep an eye on how the wall is progressing you can catch minor errors and adjust the next row of bottles to help fix that error. I have to give Allen a lot of credit here. He has done a marvelous job on these kitchen bottle walls. He has built a straight wall. Has remembered when to put in all the electric lines, pipes and steel bars for hanging the cabinets with. And Allen has gotten really fast in leveling the bottles. By the time I get a mixture of mud made he has the previous bottles all laid out. Leveling bottles may seem easy. It doesn't look all that complicated in the photos. IT ISTN'T. You are working with a round 2 1/2 pound plastic bottle and each one can be a different shape. You have to level each end of the bottle because most of the plastic bottles have a curved shaped in the middle. By the time you get one end leveled to the other bottle it can throw off the leveling of the whole bottle and the other end. Each bottle needs to be leveled 4 times. Patience is a must when learning this. One may ask, Well, How did you learn this? Good question. There are no books on doing this. We learned from looking at photos of the buildings built in the 3rd world countries. And from just doing it. We took this idea of building with compacted water bottles and used this idea in our project. Sometimes it just takes the guts of doing it to make it work. The advantage of building with compacted bottle bricks is a really strong wall that will add thermal mass to your building. This means better regulated temperatures in your home. Our earthship is all about thermal mass. I took this photo to show that Allen is now up in the rafters in putting this bottle wall up. He has to duck in-between the rafters now. The lights that you see are LED lights that Allen made himself. They are temporarily placed there so we could see when we have rainy weather outside. They will eventually be placed recessed within the ceiling. We have so far put up 27 rows of bottles. When we first estimated how many rows that were going to be needed we figured on 30 rows for the shortest part of the wall. The ceiling gets higher going from the back of the front of the Earthship. Allen figures that we have two more rows for the back part of the wall and then we will be at the ceiling.
The east side entrance bottle work has now all been roughed in. We had two areas on the left hand side of the doorway to complete. Our son Arron had been given the task to decide on how to construct the openings. He came up with the zig zag idea. Now looking from the inside on the right hand side. Can you see the zig zag design with the blue and green bottles? We like the idea and how it turned out. Arron also wanted to use brown bottles. And since he chose not to put any in the zig zag design that was the main focus for the space to the far right. There is only enough room to put a row of bottles. Arron decided to use brown and clear bottles. The ramps are new. They are to help in getting wheel barrows and our hand truck in and out of the earthship a little easier. The west side entrance bottle work has been roughed in as well. This was designed by Allen. It has a different look from the east side. Arron decided for his space to put the zig zag design in again but changed the colors around. This photo also shows the amount of papercrete that has been applied. The covering under the windows is all papercrete ( Home made insulation ). We have yet to fill in all of the gaps. The tires will end up being a completely smooth surface with a stucco finish going over top of the papercrete. This is the inside view of the bottle work for the west side entrance. This now completes the exterior roughing in of the bottle work. Stucco will need to be applied for a finish coat to all of the bottle windows. All that is left for the exterior openings are for the doors to be put in place. Allen has to also design the windows that will open for the greenhouse and the sunroom areas.
We have been working in-between the rain drops to get the glass bottle work done around the east entry door. We have a west entry door as well that will have bottle windows around them also. We are in the process of designing them. At the moment this is what we have done so far. We will need to apply a final layer of stucco to finish them off. The boards that you see in- between the designs will not be visible when we put on the final coat of stucco. Can you see the border around the doorway? The pattern in the middle along the side of the door, What do you see? Arron see's a robot, Mary sees a tree, and Allen sees a cool design. However, Allen saw a smiley face in the space above the doorway. Now we shall tell the rest of the story. Months ago Allen had told me that he wanted a smiley face for in the design of the bottle work. When he told me this I said ummm, NO I don't think so. When I went about designing this I had changed it from my original design to this one. Everyone in the family agreed. When it was done and set in stone Allen said right away a smiley face. I said what? Unbeknownst to me I had designed a smiley face without even realizing it. We all like the bottle work that has turned out so far. Even the smiley face. It is actually really cool. FYI: This photo of the inside was taken at sunset. We are really amazed as to how well the bottles glow even with just daylight on a cloudy day. This is a close up of our bottle work showing the roughed in look. This will be covered with a final layer of stucco to bring it out the the edge of the bottles.
We have another workshop scheduled for October 8th at the Severin Earthship in Pomona, MO. We are just 10 miles north of West Plains Missouri. Please click on Upcoming Workshop tab above to get all the details. A Big THANK YOU to our VolunteersWe would like to Thank Robert and Lucy Jones for helping us at our last workshop. Robert did great in mud packing tires and Lucy did a wonderful job in making glass bottle bricks. With their help we were able to finish the first coat of mud packing our bedroom and we now have a whole slew of bottle bricks ready to use for our bathroom. Thank you for helping.
We have been invited to be a guest speaker at this years Ozark's Sustainability Festival. We have chosen to speak on the 6 Core Concepts of an Earthship. We will be giving details on 1) Building with Natural and recycled Materials, 2) Thermal/ Solar heating and cooling, 3) Water Harvesting, 4) Food Production, 5) Solar and Wind Electricity, & 6) Contained Sewage Treatment. We will share our building experience of our Earthship and how our home is using the 6 Core Concepts. If you are in our area we invite you to come and join the fun of this year's FREE Sustainability Festival. For more information visit the website by clicking on the button below. Greenhouse SkylightsThere are many times during this building process that we have had to think things through and learn how to do something. This includes in how to create and make our own sky lights. Even though Allen used the example in the Earthship books to go off of, we still had to design them and get them to work effectively. Allen used treated lumber and painted it with exterior paint. We had chosen to use plexiglass that is designed for skylights. The plexiglass is 20 times stronger than glass. Because we did not use glass the skylights are a lot lighter. Allen drilled holes through the plexiglass and sealed it with Butyl Tape. Allen covered where he screwed in the plexiglass with metal and sealed the edge of the metal and the plexiglass with silicone. We needed to add weight for the sky lights to open. We had bought some bricks at a really good price and decided to see if they would give us enough weight to make the sky lights open up. The bricks with added sand did the trick. Allen then covered the bricks with a metal cover. Making the ScreenAllen and I decided to make our own frame for the screens when we found out how much they cost. At Walmart they cost just under $11.00 per frame and that did not include the screen. Using scrap wood that we had left over from another project Allen cut a grove in the wood to secure the screen into and he painted the frame. He used screws to secure it in place then proceeded to put in the screen with a screening tool to push and roll the screen cord into. Then Allen trimmed off the excess. And there you have it folks. A home made screen that cost about $1.00 for the frame and about $3.00 for the screen and cord. The skylight opens from inside using cords. In the Earthship books Michael Reynolds says to make a hole within the screen. Allen decided to make metal grommets that he put within the screen frame itself. He sanded the edges to make sure that the metal was smooth so it would not tear the cord going through them. At the top of the photo you will see a hole within the screen frame this is where the grommet is located. Above the grommet will be metal to cover that edge of the skylight box. In this photo you see where we tied the cord to round fasteners on the inside of the skylight. We put the cord through the grommets and then through the cleats that will lock the cord in place when the skylight is closed. The cleats are used on sail boats to clip in cords for the sail. We learned about the use of cleats when we had rented a Earthship out in Taos, New Mexico 4 years ago. They had the cleats installed in the Earthship we had rented that was one of the new Global Models that was built. It is a new way to secure the skylights. These cleats that we bought will hold 200 pounds. The skylight is fastened to hinges. To maximize the effect of gravity. When we pop the cords out of the cleats the weight on the skylight ( Bricks and Sand) goes down lifting the skylight up. To close and lock the skylight in place all you do is pull down on the ropes and clip them into the cleats. These 3 skylights each measure 24 x 48 for in the greenhouse. The box that the sky light is attached to is 9 inches tall. The height of the box and the length including the weight section of skylight will determine how big of an opening you will have with the skylight. The opening for these skylights are 11 & 1/2 inches. Sunroom SkylightsThis is the smaller skylight that we had made for each sunroom. This skylight measures 15 x 24 The box secured to the roof is 8" tall. This skylight opens 7 inches. Skylight when closed. The sunroom skylight is much smaller so we estimated that only 1 cord would be needed to open and close the skylight with. Overall the skylights work extremely well. Because we made these skylights we could match the color to the roof, making them blend with the roof. The way that they open does help to keep some rain out in the event it rains with the skylights open. They are easy to open and close. The cords that hang down in the greenhouse and sunrooms will be wrapped up to a side wall so they will not hang in walk space.
Cost wise: The plexiglass and the treated lumber was the most expensive part of the skylights. We believe it cost us just over $525.00 to make all 5 skylights with the screens. PapercreteJust letting you know of a few things that we are working on and what progress is being made. We put the first layer of papercrete in the west sunroom. For those that haven't been following our blog I will give a quick intro to papercrete. This is a homemade insulation that is made from lots of water, cement, clay, shredded paper, and borox. This batch of papercrete turned out the best. What we did different this time was to soak the paper in advance before using it. This made for a creamier mixture and the fibers of the paper were nice and smooth. Because this is a south side outside wall that will not be buried in dirt we are packing the tires with papercrete to protect against the elements. This should stop any cold from coming through and heat leaving to the outside. The whole outside of the tires will be coated in papercrete as well. Michael Reynolds the inventor of Earthships doesn't use papercrete. They use ridged insulation and cover it with metal instead. Nothing against this. Papercrete forms to the surface thus no air gaps and no critters can get into it. We add Borox to stop any bugs from wanting to eat the paper and it also prevents mold from growing. Using papercrete is something that we have discovered in our studies of alternative building. According to Living In Paper that has done extensive research into papercrete the R Value of papercrete is between 2.0 and 3.0 per inch. For packing in-between tires this is ideal. We have used 17.5 inch tires for the building of our Earthship. The depth of packing papercrete in-between ( in the crevice) our tires is 17 inches. Multiply that by 2.0 at a minimum is an R34 for each side. Not to bad. We are not exactly sure this is what we have and I am not sure if we will ever know for sure what the actual R - Value is for using papercrete. All I know it is less expensive to make it than to buy something that isn't going to seal as well around round objects. We weren't exactly sure how papercrete would seal next to wood. So far it has done really well. I am not sure if this is because where we have put papercrete is where we have painted the wood framing to protect it from the elements? Perhaps this is the reason why it has worked so well. We are not sure. The photo above shows the papercrete that we used to fill in the gap between the wooden frame of the doorway and the windows for the sunroom. Papercrete will usually shrink because of the amount of water that is used. We use alot of clay with our papercrete to allow us to pack the tires better. It isn't a normal papercrete formula. It works really well for the applications that we have used it in. The metal lath is set to put glass bottles in for around the door way. To make a long story short, we were able to get a lot of out dated beer from the Budweiser Distribution plant in our area. We had to dump the beer but this gave us the blue and green bottles we needed to finish the sunroom windows. Allen saved the bottle caps and used them to put the lath up with instead of buying more of the proper nails needed for this job. The photos below just show where we have put papercrete and how well it sticks and seals. Compacted Bottle Bricks We have added 6 rows of compacted plastic bottle bricks to the kitchen wall. At the moment we are focusing on just this wall for our interior walls. This is the main wall that we want to finish so we can start to live in it by the winter time. The wall to the left is the back of the kitchen. On the other side is part of the back hall way. The floor for the kitchen area will come up to the to of the concrete footing that you see there. The wall to the right side is the side of the kitchen wall. The blue boxes are outlets for the gas stove that will have automatic ignitor ( that is within the wall) and for an outlet that will be above the bottom cabinets ( above the wall but connected with conduit.) The white pipes towards the bottom of the photo are for water lines to go the the kitchen sink and the bathroom sink that will be on the other side of the wall. This is the corner of the kitchen that then goes back to the hallway on one side with the bathroom on the other side.
So far we have put up 13 rows of compacted bottles to equal approximately 1,183 bottles used for just this part of the house. Each bottle weighs approximately 2.25 pounds. That is approximately 2661 pounds of compacted dirt just within the bottles this does not include the weight of the earthen cement mortar that we use in-between the bottles. Since a ton is considered weighing 2,000 lbs, the compacted bottles are over a ton of weight just with these bottles. Because of the tires that are compacted with dirt and now the bottles I can safely say that our house literally weighs tons. We have estimated that it will take approximately 30 rows of bottles to reach the ceiling. This will be over 3 tons of weight just with the bottles in this area of the house. We will see how close our estimates are. I can say that we do have enough bottles that are compacted with dirt and ready to go to finish this part of the wall. At times it doesn't seem like we have done a lot of work. Being more prep work to accomplish a task. But because of all of this prep work the construction will smoother and not have to wait to build because of prep work. When it rains we do a lot of prep work to keep us moving forward. This is the start of the West Sunroom floor. Since the floor in our home starts with the ground we decided when we were preparing the footings ( for our walls ) that we would come up from the ground roughly 12 inches to where the height of the floors will be . We start this by layering 3 different size of rocks starting the the biggest to the smallest. What you see above is the third layer of rock starting out. All of the rocks are from all of the sifting done on our property. We use the sifted clay to pack into our plastic bottles, use in earthen cement, in making papercrete, packing mud between the tires and also to use the clay that ends up becoming the subfloor of each room. Just about everything that we do for the earthship involves all different sizes of rock and sifted dirt. We will basically live in a home of recycled materials and earth. Once this small rock is completed we will compact it down and add another layer of fine rock before the sifted clay dirt goes on top for the subfloor. We have decided so far to put in a combination of brick (with a design in the floor) and earthen cement to fill in-between. Back Hallway FloorWe have been working on the back hallway floor now for the past several months. The motivating factor to get this done instead of finishing the exterior was because we needed the partial floor done to get the battery box in place and solar power in the Earthship. Walking in and out of a room that has part of the floor done was starting to be a pain. We were starting to stumble on the floor drain and the ground steaks holding the forms in place. We decided to put in a glass bottle border in place and that is what is in the making in the next few photos. We feel that the back hallway is our experimenting station. By the time we get everything figured out with the back room we will have gained the skills to make the main living areas looking great. We are not as concerned about this back hallway. So making mistakes is not a big deal here. It is nice to have a room to learn with since the Severin Family has never done this kind of project before. We all need to learn how to create the desired effect that we want. The floors that we poured in these photos are a stronger earthen cement. This is so the floor will hold up to the weight of the battery box for our solar and wind system. We used a mixture of water, cement, sand, clay and aggregate. One thing you need to remember when building an Earthship, before you start the next sigmate of the project always ask, Do we need pipes or electrical conduit put in first? If you do forget this you will have a very difficult time fixing anything without it costing you a lot in money and time. This back hallway is not only for our electric and water supply it is for our washing machine, sink, and freezer also. For around the bottles we used a earthen mortar. It is basically a earthen cement floor with out the aggregate. The bottle border is cool looking but was a lot of work pouring in the mud and packing in between the bottles. The middle part of the floor is a softer earthen cement. We used 1/2 of the amount of the cement than what we used for the other floors. This floor did dry hard but is much softer. When the floor was drying a couple of cracks did show up. Allen was able to smooth those away with a wet sponge. When thinking about why did the floor cracked there and not any where else, we came up with an idea. For the rest of the floor Allen sprayed water on the subfloor before pouring in the floor. Allen did not do this in the last part of the floor. Because the subfloor was made up of clay. The clay was sticking to his boots a lot. So he didn't add the water to the subfloor. We believe the floor dried too fast in that area thus making it crack. From now on we will spray water on the floor before pouring in the rest of the floors to help in preventing cracking. This is why we call it the experimental room. It is our place to learn from. The whole room will need to be sealed with a water proofing sealant. We are not sure if we will use natural oils or a cement sealant yet. At the moment we store lots of stuff in here and we walk back in this hallway a lot. We will see how the floor holds up to the amount of traffic and wear of the floor. Now for the PipesLike I said earlier we sift a lot of dirt and sort out the different size of rock. I asked Allen just the other day where he would like me to dump the rock that I have sorted out so it can be used for the floor in the Earthship later. His response was," Why move the rock 3 times?" So we have decided that rock will be going into the Earthship as it is sifted out. Because of this decision. We have to put in our pipes that need to go into the ground before we start piling rock all over the place. The pipe below is for the drain water from the washing machine and laundry sink to the greenhouse planter. Again I will stress that thinking ahead is the name of the game for when building an Earthship. We had to have planned where the pipes where going to go before we poured the footings for the walls last year. Some of the pipes needed to be place within the footing or underneath them. The next image shows the pipe that goes through the footing to hook into the pipe on the other side of the bottle wall. This is the other end of that pipe that goes underneath the footing into the greenhouse. This will be on the west end of the planter that will go towards the east to the pit. Our home will reuse the water 3 times before it goes out to the septic tank. #1 is the collection of rain water stored in the cisterns, #2 is using the water for showering, laundry, etc, #3 is to use it for the toilet. By the time the water passes through the 5 planters that we will have in our Earthship the plants will have cleaned the water that will be great for using in the toilet. This pipe has been tested and does drain like it should with no leaks. Not to bad for rookies that haven't had any professional training in this craft. Bathroom PipesWe are hooking up the bathroom sink to the shower. The pipe T that you see near the bottle wall is approximately where the sink will go. The big pipe that looks like it is underneath the drain pipe ( it is off to the side ) is the septic pipe for the toilet. The septic pipe was placed last year and goes underneath the footing and underneath the greenhouse tire wall as well. After putting the pipe together we discovered the pipe in the footing (off to the left) that was placed for the sink and shower was not low enough. By right it should of gone underneath the footing. Because of the long span of the pipe and it all needs to go down hill, we will have to make a step up into the shower. The flat top of the shower drain is the height of the floor just within the shower. All of the pipe will be within the floor it's self. The bricks are just laying out the pattern for the shower. Where you see the double brick is how thick the wall will be for about 3 feet or so. This is 8 inches all around. The Gatorade bottles that are on the left side will be used to bring up the wall to approximately 2 to 3 feet of height using a cement mortar to secure them in place. Then we plan on cutting down the thickness of the wall to 4 inches giving us a ledge to put our feet up on and for setting soap and shampoo on. We will use glass bottles for the 4 inch wall up to the ceiling. The shower will be approximately 5 feet in diameter.
Stay tuned. More to come soon. I must first apologize to our followers about the lack of updating our blog. I did not realize we have had as many followers than we now do. I will make an effort to update it at least once a month. If you would like to know when we update our blog with a new post, please send us an email and let us know that you would like to be notified when a new post is up. Thank you to everyone and your patience. You can click on the email link at the top right corner of the page. Mary Severin Our main goal for this year is to enclose in our Earthship. We are hoping to have it all enclosed by the end of summer. A part of this is to fill in the glass bottle windows in our sunrooms. The photo below is the east sunroom. We also have a west sunroom as well. We have had to do a lot of prep work for filling in the top windows of our sunroom. Allen made a frame matching the same size window that we had to work with. We cut the bottles, washed them, rinsed them, let them dry and then taped them together to create theses bricks. We then had something to work with to make our design. Allen wanted a diamond shaped window. Mary wanted something that would help to carry the design from window to window since we had 7 windows to fill per sunroom. We had to use the smaller beer bottles in order for the design to work. Even though we had never done a glass bottle window before we felt confident we could figure out how to create this pattern with the bottles. What we needed was a grid. We did not want to end up on the last row being short. And with a design like this it would not look right if we did not have them aligned right. So Allen figured out the grid. Based on our design made in our fake window frame he came up with the grid below. Allen then mapped out the different colors that would be used for the windows. We decided that two windows would be brown, two green, two blue and the one in the middle would be clear with all the colors combined. Allen then used his string art skills to create a guide for each window.The next step is to mix a mud mixture of water, cement, clay, and sand to lay our bottles into. We found that we could only do one row at a time. Especially since we were following a design. If we laid two rows at a time the bottles could move because the first set of mud had not dried. We did have to chip out a section of bottles because of this happening. When creating a pattern we recommend to lay one row at a time filling in more than one window area. By the time that one row would be done depending on how much you are doing you could start on the next row. You can see how Allen followed the grid that he had made out. Because of using bottles that are bright in color, all we need is daylight for the bottle to glow on the inside. This is the east sunroom roughed in with the glass bottles. We have yet to do the finish coat on the bottle windows. I would say that our first experience in putting in glass bottle windows was a success. It took 124 blue Budweiser platinum bottles matched up to 124 Coke -cola bottles, 124 brown beer bottles matched up to 124 clear beer bottles, 248 green bottles total, 480 clear bottles total; matching clear to clear and 64 Coke-Cola bottles, for a grand total of 1288 bottles used to create this design in both sunrooms. When we put two brown and two blue bottles together this created dark colors we decided to match them up with lighter colors to get the bright colors to come through. The green bottles would not of been as dark if we didn't match two of them together. The next project is the east side exterior door. All the spaces around the door will be filled in with glass bottle windows. With building an Earthship we have to think in advance. The electrical conduits and boxes all have to be in place before putting in the glass bottles. This is what the blue is in the photo. The boards going above and below the blue electrical conduit will not be visible when the glass bottle work is complete. They are set inside the wall. There will be boards on the left side of the door as well. We feel that if we divide this big of a project into thirds it will be easier especially when incorporating some sort of design. We can also do more of the window area at one time. Making the project go much faster. The wood boards will be covered in mud thus making it look like one complete unit.
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AuthorMary Severin writes about her families embarkment on a learning adventure to build an Upcycled Home using Earthship Principals. To find out what these Principals are click on the Earthship Principals link above. CategoriesArchives
March 2018
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