Dometastic

It is February and all week it was in the 60's. This weather has us twitchy to start our process but we know that the warm won't last. Typically February in CT is still below freezing most of the time. This week still shows warmer than normal weather for February. We can't do much to start the house yet but there are other things on the property that we need to work on. I am also working on the design of the small horse barn we will be building before the dome goes up. Once I finish the design I will share it.  The property came with a small barn. We can't use it for animals since it is in a conservation area but we are allowed to use it for anything else and maintain the area around it. The structure is solid and the roof is good but the walls.... not so much. Some genius used particle board sheets for the walls and then never put siding on the outside of the barn. So now the walls are sad, saggy and falling down. All these need to be pulled off and we will measure...

Lets talk about the disaster proof aspect of a monolithic dome. Depending on your personal belief in Global Climate Change you may need to keep your tinfoil hat ready. For those of you who believe that the data means that humanity is shooting itself in the foot...you can just skip the tinfoil for today. Clearly Mr. Dometastic and I believe that climate change is a reality. That is one of the biggest factors for building this house. I will admit that there is a part of me that feels awkward about building this house because of future "ifs". This must be how all the people who built cold war bomb shelters felt. For them it was a pointless exercise in making them feel safe. Of course, at the time, all those people didn't know that the bombs would never come. The shelters were never needed and were arguably inadequate if there was nuclear fall out. Duck and cover! "40 Million May Die. How About You" (That is quite the marketing tag line!) Maybe we are no...

The engineering on the dome is progressing. This week my homework was to decide what company we are going to use for our security shutters that will cover all the windows and decide how big we want the garage/basement to be under the dome. We looked into having the basement be the entire footprint of the house. It was too costly and way more square footage than we need. A 2700 sqft basement would just encourage us to store even more boxes we packed up 4 moves ago! I think everyone has these boxes. You know the ones I am talking about. The ones you pack with stuff you just CAN'T throw out but have no use for either. We have boxes we inherited that were packed from when my Mom sold her house in the late 1990's. Extra storage space is an enabler to the pack rat in all of us. We made our basement size decision based on one very important feature. A recycling chute! We want a kitchen island recycling chute straight into a bin in the basement. I think this is genius! I can...

While we wait as patiently as possible for spring to dig holes for our new perc tests my posts will be directed towards general dome related things. Most people I talk to know what a dome home is but are clueless about the different types of domes. This post is to help show the differences between geodesic and monolithic domes with a few pictures of each. The saying "a picture is worth a thousand words" is true and a video must be worth 100000 words. (Watch a video of a monolithic dome being constructed at the end of this post to really wrap your mind around the process.) Many people have asked me how a monolithic dome is different than a geodesic dome. The answer can be quite simple. A monolithic dome structure is all one piece and geodesic domes are made up of many pieces (triangles) connected together. Monolithic domes are sprayed concrete like some inground pools. Here are some photos of interior and exterior monolithic domes. Compare the above Mon...