It took us about 2 weeks of digging, but the foundation is finally dug. We still have a bit of leveling and finishing to get done today, but all of the really hard stuff is done. It wouldn’t even have taken us 2 weeks if we hadn’t had to stop for a couple days every time there was a hard rain. We were also helped along by Liz’s idea to dig the sub-floor out to 2 different depths rather than removing all of the dirt to the lowest point. It saved a huge amount of digging.
I think a lot of people doubted that we’d actually be able to dig the whole foundation with hand tools. If there had been a lot of rocks in the dirt or it had been more compacted that may have been the case, but it was pretty much pure clay that wasn’t too awful to get out. We’ll also be able to use it to plaster the house, make the earthen floor, and build the bench for the rocket stove. Don’t get me wrong it was still a lot of hard sweaty work, but I found it extremely satisfying. Plus I got a nice tan out of it and a shirtless picture of me, of which the world can never be blessed with enough of.
It’s been exciting to see the building floor emerge from the earth. It makes imagining the rooms and the space a much more tangible exercise. It’s going to be a very nice sized building, not too small and not too big. I’m also happy that we were able to orient it for passive solar. I had begun to think we weren’t going to be able to until I found that true south wasn’t where I had thought it was.
The trenches seem to be draining pretty well for the most part, but the sub-floor needs to have the edges leveled down so that the water drains off of it a bit better. The next step after tamping and leveling is going to be laying down a perforated drain pipe in the middle of the rubble trench and leading down the drain ditch. We also need to install an duct pipe that’ll allow us to run wires and flexible tubing inside the building without going through the straw bale wall which might allow moisture to get into the bales. A drain pipe for all the faucets and the shower is going to need to be laid so that it connects up with the perforated drain pipe in the rubble trench.
We’ll also be putting in 2” panels of rigid foam polystyrene insulation on the outside section of the rubble trench to insulate the foundation somewhat. I’m not very happy about using polystyrene in the building, but I haven’t been able to find a better alternative and I want to make sure that the foundation has a little insulation. I may find out it’s not that important to have, but until then I want to make sure we don’t have a well insulated house with a heat sink for a floor.
After all that is laid down we’ll start filling the whole thing up with gravel and tamping it down until it’s all 6” below grade, and then we’ll start building the urbanite(reclaimed cement chunk) stem wall mortared together that will extend at least 1’ above ground.
In other news, I built a 4’x8’ guinea henhouse and got it stocked with 6 guineas that Daniel and I got from a poultry swap meet a couple hours south of here. It was the only place we knew we could reliably find guinea chicks that were old enough that they didn’t need a heat lamp but not so old that they’d run away whenever we let them out. I got 3 each from 2 different ladies, one group is 3 weeks old and the other group is 4-5 weeks old.
We’re going to have to keep them in the henhouse for at least a couple weeks, maybe significantly more so that they know its home. I’m also going to start teaching them to come to me with a call and giving them some white millet. Liz might take that over from me when she gets back from her weddings in Virginia on Wednesday.
It’s not dropping below 60 now and the birds just finished their 2nd night and seem to be fine. I put a cardboard box inside the henhouse and put some straw in it and then covered it with straw for more insulation. I put them in there at night since otherwise they all just group together in a corner. It’s good that they group together, but if it’s just up against the plywood their going to loose a lot of heat so I put them in the box and they group up in there instead.
I’m looking forward to letting the little guys and girls out to eat bugs to their heart’s content. A guinea can eat 200 ticks a day, multiply that by 6 and we’ve dealt a massive blow to the tick population around here. They also range up to a ¼ of a mile radius and get up to 90% of their food from ranging which makes them extremely cheap and effective. They don’t scratch the ground and they only eat grass and seeds apart from insects so they’re great to have in the garden as long as you don’t start feeding them vegetable scraps, because then they’ll start finding those vegetables in the garden.
