Earth Ship Part 3

Since I’ve taken a lengthy break from this topic, here are some notes to catch you up.

1) An Earth Ship is a self-sufficient home shaped like a greenhouse and built from recycled tires.
2) My parents built one.
3) I took up the hobby of rifling through their old emails and Facebook posts to try and summarize the building process for them so they could happily reminisce about it in their old age.
4) So far I managed to consolidate the first year of construction into a photo book, which I gave to them as a gift.   Now it’s time for me to catch up with all the work they’ve done since then.

When we left off, they had just poured concrete for the driveway.  They also had concrete poured for the wind turbine and solar panel, which were my dad’s passion projects.

Pouring concrete for the wind turbine

The next big project was the windows.  My parents later learned an important lesson about angled awning windows: they leak.  It took them several tries before they were able to permanently fix the issue.

Pounding rubber gaskets into the window perimeters

Putting up the perimeter for the windows

Then for the roofing.

You’ll notice that the sides of the house had been prepped for stucco.  They were covered in paper and chicken wire, which gave the stucco something to hold onto.

Before stucco

As you can imagine, the stucco came next.

Putting on the colored stucco

After stucco

At this point fall was fast approaching.  Doors, garage doors, and window trim were hurriedly installed in order to protect the home from the harsh Colorado blizzards.  Now my parents turned their attention to the inside necessities: floors, walls, cabinetry, plumbing, and electricity.

Hickory cabinets were installed.

While winter raged outside, the hard work continued inside the as-yet unheated shell of the Earth Ship.

Next comes the fun part… decorative details.