A daunting task

Our neighbor let us borrow his John Deer tractor. Without the help of so many good friends, this project would have never gotten off the ground.



Our little dome (and our home for seven years) is in the background. In the foreground, the fellas keep setting those poles.


Checking for straight and level.

16 poles and what do you get?

And so it was with each an every pole....all sixteen.

the abstract becomes concrete

The forms were hand-dug from the trench. Conrete was mixed bag by bag, in a small mixer our neighbor lent to us. We then pored it into the forms. Later, the posts were screwed down to the concrete pads.

The farm truck that is no longer....

Here, a good friend and neighbor stops by to help.

In shadow...

A friend, who also happens to be an engineer, came to the rescue. He flew with a grinder in his checked luggage-among other tools he deemed necessary. He also helped us complete the leveling process, which included setting 6-inch steeel piers and topping them with huge beams cut at a local mill.

digging in the dirt

100 wheelbarrows by hand!

Schnitzel, the kitty who never stops mewing

Many friends donated their expertise and/or their resources. Here we try to finish a set of 16 concrete pads for the peirs of the foundation of the house before the sun goes down. There were many a night we worked until the sun disappeared.

Ol' Fashioned House Raising

Here we are breaking ground with my husband's parents. We don't have photographs of the massive tree-felling and clean-up operation-but it was quite impressive. We felled three, 100 foot tall, red alder trees that were encroaching on our building site. We then pain-stakingly cut the sod by hand with shovels and the four of us hauled it to the side of the field. Again, an impressive feat. That has been the way with each and every part of building our home-a series of impressive feats.

Here we level on the level.
We cleared the first hundred wheelbarrows from the trenches by hand. When a good friend came to our rescue (convincing us to rent a back hoe and then running the primitive machine for 8 or more hours), we began to realize the scope of the project that lay ahead.

We call it adventure livin' We made a home for seven years under the sheath of the dome. Now we live, off-grid, in a home we built together.

I have never made a blog post. In fact, until last fall-and for my entire stay in the dome-I had no internet access at home.

The world is an ever changing place and in many ways, I will never be able to catch up.

This is my experiement.