When we moved into our sphere in the Spring of 1998 we were happy to have our own home at last. We didn't mind that it was small. After a few years we did. In the Fall of 2001 I ordered the materials to begin an addition. My original concept was to build small domes around the base of the sphere, but adding on one room at a time no longer seemed like the best way to proceed. Instead I made a dome bigger than our upstairs, the same configuration, but expanded. I spread the sheets further apart in the same geometry, and triangulated the upper part of the dome with 2x4s. This dome was to get us on the ground level. After decades of living in 3rd floor apartments we had built a second story living space, and we wanted to live on the first floor! At least the kitchen and living room. The dome shell went up quickly. I had a struggle with the base because I had never made a 3v dome before, just the sphere, and didn't know that a 30 ft. 3v dome does not have a 30 ft. diameter base! It is a little smaller than that. I was laying out the posts on a steep hillside with a line level and plumb bob, too, which was a challenge. With the posts too far apart I had to enlarge the dome even more to fit the posts, to 30'8". This turned out to be beneficial, because it worked and we got an even larger dome.
I got as far as making it watershedding before winter came. I hung a swing from the top and we had some wild times swinging Rosa and her friends around.
For several years I was short of money and time because we bought a small adjoining piece of land. All I could do was move dirt with a wheelbarrow to work the dome into the site (2002), work on the ferrocement base wall (2003)and start covering the top with aluminum shingles and a ventilator (2004)
Last year (2005) I felt pressed to make better progress on this dome. In the spring I dug a deep ditch around the side of the dome and filled it with 14 yards of sand and some stone at the bottom. I dug the ditch between the sphere and the dome and finished the ferrocement base wall. Then I dug a foot of dirt from inside the dome to make more room for the floor structure. I made raised beds for our garden with the dirt. Then I cut the hemlock 2x6's I had air dried since the summer before into 2x3's and built a 3 way structural network to support the subfloor of 1" hemlock boards. My neighbor advised me on hooking up to the septic tank and saved me several days work.
By this time it was Fall.
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Windows and doors were next. I had been saving windows for years, and I made roundtop doors of cedar. |
We got a soapstone stove with a metal chimney and I insulated the dome with Reflectix. |
When I did all the wheelbarrow and shovel work around the base I ran foam insulation inside the ferrocement walls and outward at a downward angle to make an insulated foundation with a small cape. This is to raise the frost level around the building. It does seem cozy in there. The floor is insulated with 3/8" foam board with air spaces above and below.
 It is shaping up very well. The picture on the left is a Zometool representation of the latest addition and the planned expansion for my daughters bedroom, an 18 ft. sphere bursting out of the northeast side of the dome about 6 1/2 ft. off the floor, but closer to the uphill grade outdoors. There will be a loft on the north side too, at the same level.
Lately I have been working on improving the lighting in our house. When I built the place in 1997-8 I only installed sockets, no switches. So we had only plugged in lamps until recently. In the attached dome I am going to install bubble ceiling fixtures on 25 of the vertexes with a dimmer switch that will control all of them. They will all be over 10 feet off the floor. |
