"Just in time for the snowstorm," says our friend Mark.

Morality vs. legality?

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/23/us/in-lagunitas-calif-a-fight-over-worms-and-moats.html?_r=2&hp

Trashscaping

The hoards of stuff that has accrued needs to be dealt with. As a first reaction, the piles are separated according to material - smaller piles. Many of these objects have no direct immediate use. But their storage might suggest some spatial arrangement in itself.

Pathways, fences, garden boundaries, seating, and tables - the materials are sorted and given some temporal substance - a kind of functional display while they await a more specific re-purposing.

Rubber Foundation

The tire foundation - a technique adopted from Earthship designs - requires about 300 pounds of dirt to be packed into each tire. The tires are a kind of permanent formwork for the dirt and act as giant masonry units, staggered by course. Labor is intensive, but materials are available and the process primitive.

Shoveling, pushing, punching, more shoveling, sledgehammering.The tires plump up to extraordinary sizes and feel like rock upon completion.

To prevent the water issues that the previous wall had we install a french drain from some scavenged pipe and bits of crushed rubble. Ideally we should have at least 6 inches of this above the pipe for good drainage, but are short on rubble. Breaking up more blocks is tiresome and what we feel is a poor use of a solid building material.

Down the street, on a lot where a building once stood many years ago, is a small mound of asphalt. It's hard to guess how many years it's been sitting there, situated very visibly on the corner of the block. In smaller pieces it is perfect for drainage material. So we proceed to clean up the lot while waterproofing our new foundation - another win-win scenario.

Seventy-four tires. Twenty-two thousand pounds of dirt. Thanks to more of our helpers: Lu, Anthony, Connor, Jared, Joe, and Chris.

The room now largely stabilized, we can begin more generous alterations to it. A new walkway forms atop the tire wall, eventually leading to new access to the backyard.

ARC 699 - Advanced Sledgehammering

The west retaining wall in the backroom continues to slowly sag inward. It's unlikely that it would collapse in the next months, but is perhaps the single most problematic thing from keeping the house from getting off the demolition list.

Many of the blocks come out by hand or a few light swings of a hammer - testament to its frailty. What sits behind is a very poorly placed concrete strip footing, about 12" thick and 24" deep. The mass, luckily, is broken in half which puts it into very manageable (.....) 2-ton sections.

After lifting and bracing the ends of the beam that used to sit on the footing, it can be removed. It has an intimidating head start - its mass hanging, leaning toward us held back only by the friction of the soil. It's already been heaved from the expanding and contracting ground - not having been placed below the frost line. After deciding which of us would cut off his limbs to escape for help should it fall, we pick up our sledgehammers and start to get it out.

A day and one bottle of ibuprofen later, the mass is out of the dirt wall and on the basement floor, still in considerably massive pieces. Special thanks to Wade, Tim, Dylan, Greg, and Will for their help in breaking them up and hurling them out.

Each subtraction we make from the structure comes with some uncertainty. We are dumbstruck as to how the house continues to hold itself up as we remove what are supposed to be the main supports. Old, neglected, decrepit; It's far tougher than it seems.

Still, its resilience is only temporary. We need to rebuild the retaining wall and resupport the wooden wall above it. There are few materials that we can use to recreate this; Concrete is unavailable and environmentally damaging. Blocks are possible, but fairly sparse, and would require a number of other materials not readily available: mortar, reinforcement bar, reinforcement grout.

What are available in great abundance are tires. Nearly every abandoned lot carries several and some with mounds of fifty or more. Not only are they available, but they're environmental and visual blight. This is where we're able to act symbiotically, giving new life to otherwise detrimental matter.

So begins the restructuring of our house on waste.

Science, for Bums!

The newly drywall'ed attic is coming along quickly and soon will just need to have its seams finished. Having used the spines from pallets as the nailing plates on the attic ceiling, we're left with a lot of thin hardwood pallet boards with which we can cover the seams - but these go up like tinder and would undo everything we've accomplished in drywalling. A bit of research into alternative fire proofing methods reveals silica beads as a possible solution.

First they need to be crushed, but the pellets aren't as cooperative as we hope. Using a hammer or any very primitive crushing method results in pellets scattered across the room, largely intact. We instead acquire a used pepper grinder; It works perfectly.

The compound - sodium silicate, also known as water glass - can be crafted using these silica beads ground into a powder and dissolved in heated water and sodium hydroxide (which can often be found labeled as typical household drain cleaner). The product when applied to wood should petrify it - encrusting its organic faces into stony ones.

Two batches of the chemical are mixed up to test different ratios for the compound - the second using much less water than the first.

From left to right: untreated poplar (control), sodium-silicate poplar, high concentration sodium-silicate poplar

 Control

 Sodium silicate poplar

High concentration sodium silicate

The above samples were left in the fire for about 3 minutes. Eventually even the most fire"proof" of things will catch fire. The untreated took roughly 90 seconds to catch flames while the other two produced a thick char but did not retain flame. The higher concentration of additives seems to have been slightly sturdier - and now that we know this is a plausible operation, the proportions can be tested more thoroughly.

Spring Broke

"Spring Break" has been spent busying ourselves in the back end of the house - the focus of our efforts over the next couple of months.

The CMU retaining wall is pushing in substantially. The cores of these blocks don't appear to be infilled or reinforced - one of several reasons for their failure. Even more problematic - the walls above them rest on a small concrete strip which is resting atop the dirt adjacent to the wall, far above the frost line. The movement of this footing has been substantial enough to crack it in half and release a sizable amount of soil and water pressure onto the wall - as well as the gravity loads coming down from the house.

The last of the dirt that has washed its way in and pieces of rotting wood that hang off the west wall are cleared from the space. Despite these being structural members soundly nailed at numerous points (at one point), they come down by hand without a fight. With a push of a finger, the saturated wall moves inches, as if made of fabric.

To keep the concrete footing and the soil beneath it from caving in as we remove the blocks - the weight of the wall has to be removed from it. We fashion together several large beams by lapping scrap 2x6's and other materials together and span above and beyond the extents of the wall to be removed. Oversized and turned studs are put in between a lower and upper beam and nailed wherever possible into the existing wall in hopes of relieving the foundation of its weight.

The reinforcement in place, a strategy for rebuilding the wall needs to be prepared and fine-tuned. We weigh our options: concrete blocks, a new site cast pour (expensive), and finally - an earth tire foundation. Tires have a daunting presence in these types of neighborhoods. That inability to decompose or deteriorate which makes them such a nuisance to get rid of makes them invaluable for our purposed. We've long considered a tire roof, but the tire foundation is a more pressing matter and involves much less processing of the tire (cutting them is very difficult). What's more - these already have a fairly well established building method only using dirt as a filler material. And their large footprint make a poured concrete footer unnecessary.

We grab 50 tires from the first place we find them, roughly 150 feet down the street, and leave about 30 there. A local auto shop farther down the street urges us to take as many as we'd like and many more. Material sourcing is not an issue.

The tires are sorted by (course) height and diameter in preparation for the build - hopefully to begin soon.