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Last updated Thursday, January 17, 2002 |
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The first task was to find our ideal location. South facing slope, good drainage away from the house location, accesable within reason and of course the view. We put our road in with a large(D8) bull dozer so we decided to dig out some of the required excavation with the dozer to reduce the need for a backhoe. We ended up still needing the backhoe.. We wanted to preserve the area in front and to the sides of our house as much as possible, so I pushed most of the excavated material up and behind the house with the dozer. Then during the tire pounding and adobe making phases I had to move the dirt from up behind the house to wherever it was needed. As it happened the area was so rocky on one end of the excavation a backhoe couldn't have handled the job. We actually moved the position of the house 10 ft to the west during the excavation. I was afraid I was going to break the D8 trying to pry the rocks loose. I would recommend to anybody that if they are going to put their Earthship in rocky ground, be prepared for extra work getting the first course of tires laid. I'll talk more about that on the Tires page. Here's a picture of the initial excavation. You can see the start of our tire pile above and to the left of the pile of dirt.
After digging this giant hole and moving rocks the size of Volkswagens , we set up our break room. It's 50 ft. to the south of where we excavated for the house. We call it the ' Hard Rock Café'!
At this point we have a 45 x 120 ft area scraped fairly flat ready for TIRES .
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Click on an image to view the full size picture |
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