"What you see is what you get
You made your bed you better lie in it
As their lies put you down and their promises rust
You'll see kidney machines replaced by rockets and guns
And the public wants what the public gets
But I don't get what this public wants"
The Jam - Going Underground
So what does this 1980 hit have to do with this post? Nothing really. I just miss good music.
Among the usual, planting, pruning, soil building, maintenance, etc. that we enjoy each summer, we had a new, interesting project to keep us busy.
Flat land is always at a premium, so this little hillside next to our gravel pad looked like a tempting spot to add some earth sheltered storage and clubhouse capacity.
Earth sheltered buildings have a lot going for them. They can be drier than a traditional root cellar and without any HVAC will naturally stay cool in the summer and above freezing in the winter. We're lucky not to have any rocky soil. The digging was easy and the soil structure is solid.
All that extra soil came in handy for filling in other spots on the property to give us some more level land.
We overdid it a bit on the foundation with an eight inch insulated slab and thick footings all along the perimeter. We needed those oversized footings for the walls to come.
We decided to build with insulated concrete forms. They gave us solid concrete walls with insulation on both sides. The walls ended up being nearly 14 inches thick.
The ICF goes up like LEGO blocks. This was much faster than building concrete forms from wood.
Once the ICF is in place, you order a fleet of concrete trucks and a large concrete pumper truck. Before you know it, you have insulated, nine foot high concrete walls all around.
After adding some exterior water barrier protection, you can back fill as much soil as needed to "earth shelter" the building.
We're lucky to have a lot of truss building options in Boundary County. From engineered trusses to handmade trusses connected with wooden dowels, we have a wide range of options. For the enclosed part of the building we chose engineered trusses. They show up neatly stacked on a flatbed truck. All you do is crane them into place and you have 120 pounds per square foot of snow load. The goal here was to never need to shovel snow off that roof!
Once the fiberglass insulation was blown into the attic, we ended up with an R-80 value (more than two feet thick). The insulation contractor told us it was the highest R-value they had ever done.
For the front deck overhang, we went with a simple oversized handmade truss connected with wooden dowels.
A little bit of backfilling, and it's starting to look like a building.
Some stain work, tongue and groove blue pine for the ceiling, and concrete fiber paneling finishes things off nicely. Since the goal is a building that can remain above freezing without being heated (even when the temperature drops to -40 degrees), we realized the door is the weak link in our insulation. To solve this, we installed two 48 inch insulated steel doors. The air space between the two doors will make a big difference in insulation.
We poured a separate insulated concrete pad for the front deck area. With the soils and microclimate where we are, frost heave shouldn't be a huge issue, but better safe than sorry.
For the roofing material, we chose a specialty 24 gauge metal material that simulates an antique patina. Done in standing seam, it should be pretty much fire proof.
Raked and seeded, the hillside should fill in nicely with low growing fire and drought resistant grass by next spring. We'll also finish off the retaining walls with some decorative stone in 2024. Altogether, we think it fits in fairly well with the landscape for such a large building.
What to do in 2024? Maybe we'll add a whole house backup generator and 1,000 gallon underground propane tank, just for fun.
Now that we have four outbuildings, two large garden plots, a well established orchard, and 20 Vermont sugar maples, we may even start planning for house of some kind!
