notes on construction

In between all the order filling and website posting, we have been working on our house. Those of you who have been here know we live in a geodesic dome, something we discovered we both wanted to build almost 40 years ago when we first met. I have this vague memory of building a scale model of a dome early on, but it was only after being married for 10 years that we finally got the chance to buy a little piece of the Texas Hill Country and start working on this house, this dome.

It is still not finished, and chances are it never will be, but it is paid for--we have never had a mortgage. It has progressed through various stages, depending largely on the number of people living here. That first winter, we had clear plastic over the 5 window openings and our then two young daughters slept in the "bathroom". We did not have the waterproof coating on the ferrocement that covered the chicken wire (6 to 8 layers) skin of the dome, so we had plastic tents over the bed and the kitchen area, and we had a 50 gallon wood stove for warmth.

A couple of years later, we were weathered in, and we built a "table" with laminated 2 x 4 beams and 6 x 6 legs that became our second floor. There were 6 of us now, 2 daughters, 2 sons, and we divided the upstairs into 3 tiny rooms.

We had promised our oldest daughter her own room when she turned 12, so we hustled up a slab off one of the window openings and built an addition that actually became two rooms, one for each girl. It was one of those things that you suddenly realize your two sons will want as well, but hey, they are young yet, plenty of time. Hah! As it turned out, the shop building got too small, and we moved the patternshop into a bigger place and the boys turned the old shop into a teenager hangout. We did still build another addition, this time for the compu-dobby loom that possessed me for 12 years.

The kids are all grown up and gone, and the place is really too big for us now, but it is where we feel most at home, and we have a wonderful son-in-law (two of them actually) who help us with projects and just generally act like all our ideas are good ones.

There is an amazing cupola rising from the top pentagon of the dome now. We talked about this from the beginning--the project was a daunting one, and without help it might never have happened. The upstairs is now a master bedroom, and will soon be our office as well. The clerestory windows in the cupola have transformed the space into a light and air filled wonder, or will be as soon as the sheetrock and floating and taping and painting are done. We keep reminding ourselves that this (the odd shaped bits and pieces of sheetrock and the sheetrock mud that will fall in our faces) is why people build square and rectangular and straight walls. But never mind, it will be great!

Our son-in-law who is helping with the construction is also a rock mason and is doing a few masonry bits on the dome as well. He is an artist, and we will post some photos when the trim is painted and the dust and rock bits swept up.