The Big Elk Pyramid Project

I started building things when I was in my mid-twenties. I tried my hand at making molds, stained glass windows and model houses. I also decorated my home with crazy things like curved walls and vertical shutters made out of 4 inch floor molding in a living room that was surrounded by floor to ceiling windows. This was before vertical blinds were invented.

I started doing my own repairs after paying a fortune to a series of repairmen who either did inadequate or incomplete jobs on various projects in my house. This was my first house, which I now call ‘carpentry school’. It was an emotional buy – I liked the way it looked. It had a flat roof with a railing around, floor to ceiling windows, a half-round entrance and round concrete porch. It was also a block from the beach, and was used as a summer cottage by it’s former residents.

After having to deal with the results of those “repairmen” I decided that I could at least do as bad a job as they did. And I could do it for free!

This was 1978. There were no do-it-yourself hardware or lumber stores like there are now. At my local lumber yard, I could barely get anyone to wait on me, let alone give advice. I had the same experience in the hardware store. In those days, men did not share their secrets with women. To get information I had to act like an idiot or victim to even have the opportunity to ask a question, followed by praise and extreme gratitude. Once they got to know me, they at least viewed me as a viable customer.

They say you learn from your mistakes. Buying that house was my first – and it was a big one. There were so many things wrong, I don’t know where to start. The flat roof that caved in in the living room and bedroom in the first winter? The walls with no insulation (it was a cottage)? The septic tank that failed? The fact that it was heated with a wood stove (in the northeast) in the living room? I had my couch leaning against the living room wall, and one day when I pulled it away, the back was covered with ice. Yikes!

It’s a good thing I was young, and I can laugh now as I write this, but it was quite a challenge for me back then – with no experience, very little cash and no credit cards.

In early spring I met a man who did odd jobs for a friend of mine who agreed to help me for very little money. He was also willing to work with me one day a week as a supervisor in building a raised roof over the house. He would come and do things like set up the first few rafters and leave. With the help of a few friends, I would continue by cutting and placing the rest. The next week, we’d put the plywood on top of the rafters, and then the tar paper and shingles. Eventually, it was a finished roof, and one problem solved.

I also helped him with other projects he did over the years for other people just for the experience. Although we had nothing in common (he was a born again Christian who couldn’t stop talking about Jesus) we became good friends. Eventually I realized that he was not very conscientious. However he was very resourceful. He could always figure out a magical way to accomplish something, even if there was evidence to the contrary. He taught me to be brave and take chances. If you screw up, make sure it’s sturdy, then cover it up and make it look pretty! Like putting lipstick on a pig.

A House Built From Trash: How We Built Our Home for Next-to-Nothing

If two grandmothers can do it, anyone can! We’ll show you how we built a papercrete house on a tire foundation, share our papercrete recipe and discuss how we made a papercrete-mixer, where to find used and surplus building materials, our future plans to get off the grid and more.

More information at: www.builtfromtrash.com
Carrie Stone and Elisia Ross – Built From Trash

This Sunday, September 26, 2010 | 10:15-11:00 AM | Natural Home Tent

MOTHER EARTH NEWS FAIR – Seven Springs Mountain Resort
Seven Springs, Pa. - Sept. 25-26, 2010

What is the MOTHER EARTH NEWS FAIR?

A fun-filled, family-oriented sustainable lifestyle event, featuring dozens of practical, hands-on demonstrations and workshops from the leading authorities on:

* Renewable Energy
* Small-scale Agriculture
* Gardening
* Green Building
* Green Transportation
* Natural Health

You’ll enjoy a vast eco-friendly marketplace, organic local food and beverages as well as outdoor equipment and livestock demonstrations.

Stay in the loop! Sign up now for the MOTHER EARTH NEWS FAIR e-newsletter and get weekly updates.

MOTHER EARTH NEWS magazine has been helping folks live self-reliant, sustainable, meaningful lives for 40 years. With an audience of more than 3 million readers worldwide, it is the largest and longest-running environmental lifestyle magazine on the planet.

For more information: http://www.motherearthnews.com/fair/home.aspx

My frustration with my papercrete block has reached Shakespearean proportions! Although it is a perfect block and together with identical blocks would work to build a pyramid – it’s too heavy!! After a month and a half, I am barely able to turn it on it’s side. Maybe by Spring it will be dry enough to pick up and carry? But I need 24 of them plus four corners for the first layer. Where will I store and dry them all?

In one way, I’m saddened, because I still think it’s a great idea, but I’m also relieved – because I have a new idea for the walls that will require less paper, allow me to use dirt, and will allow me to use a method that I’m familiar with. It’s the same method I used to build our house.

If I lived in New Mexico or had a large barn or similar building to dry and make blocks all winter, my mold would be practical. But until that first block dries completely, I’m not sure how heavy it will be. I thought that by using only paper and filling the middle with empty milk jugs that it would be light enough to lift and carry. But for now, it takes all my strength just to turn it on it’s side.

Oh well, back to the proverbial drawing board.

Unfortunately, my new plan requires using wood, which I hoped to avoid. For the walls of my house, I used 2x4s to frame in the windows and hold forms that we poured the slurry between. Click on the thumbnail on the right for a good picture of the wall after the second pour. I have two wood frames, one foot apart, that define the inside and outside of the wall. The windows are all attached to the outside frame. We screwed plywood forms on both frames and poured the papercrete-dirt slurry in between them. It usually took about two days for the slurry to dry enough to remove the forms. Then we moved the plywood forms up for the next pour, as you can see to the right in the picture.

The 4×4 posts in the forefront were placed to use as a scaffold. They eventually became the frame for our walkway around that side of the house.

As you can see, we also used a tire foundation for our house (it’s too bad we didn’t discover racing tires back then). They were placed on a gravel foundation and drain similar to the tire wall of the pyramid. On top of the tires, I made a 2×6 frame and filled it with concrete. I left the 2×6′s in place after the concrete dried and used them as a base to attach the wood for the walls. Click on the thumbnail on the left for a good look at the walls before the first pour. They are painted with latex ‘oops paint’ from Lowes ($2 a can) which served as a vapor barrier between the concrete and papercrete.

The walls of the pyramid will be 6 inches thick. Because of the angle of the walls and gravity I’ll need to line the inside bottom with chicken wire. That worked for our ceilings. If we had not used chicken wire, the ceilings would have fallen to the floor once they started shrinking. They’re still up there! Either covered with wood or stucco.

I probably could have solved the problem of the block not drying by splitting it into two molds as in the picture to the left (or even three). But I would have to have an even larger space for drying!

One thing that I’m pleased with is the tire retaining wall in the front “yard” of the pyramid. I’m about half finished digging out the hill for the tire foundation, and have used the dirt to fill tires, stacking them, then back filling to create a nice flat area. The digging has been on hold for a while because of other projects that needed attention and because of the intense heat we’ve had, consistently contradicting the official weather forecasts with our mid-day temps averaging at least 100 F in the shade. I wonder where the local news is keeping their thermometers?

I can think of a few places.