Airform Shop Drawings and Corona Virus Delays?

We are in mid March and the sudden arrival of Corona Virus has disrupted everyone's lives. Our town has shut down everything but the essentials until the end of this month with the possibility of extending it. I don't have official word yet but I believe our build will now be delayed. My guess is that these two weeks will go by and they will choose to extend the shut down. This will most likely effect the town departments including building inspections. Our builder is coming from 2000k miles away so shut downs are an issue. I would imagine they are not going to risk the extra cost of potential delays related to shut downs. Our set contract price means every extra day will cost them more of their profit margin. So, like many other people, our lives are in a holding pattern.

In the mean time progress still continues. We received the airform shop drawings and gave them the thumbs up to continue. The below image is a rendering of the airform off of the shop drawing document. The airform will be "sandstone" in color and eventually covered up with some sort of stucco. We are still researching our options.

After the builders finish building the dome shell on the interior of the airform it will be trimmed for all the openings. The great room dome has a large cut away to allow an 18 foot straight wall of glass but the full dome airform is needed for construction. In the end the airform serves as a watertight membrane under the finished exterior treatment. I think it is pretty cool and can't wait to see it inflated!

If you haven't read my earlier posts when I started this blog in 2016 you may not know the reason we are building this house. Mr. Dometastic wants an energy efficient fortress to protect us from whatever comes our way. I tease him all the time about his tinfoil hat but now he gets to point to the current global pandemic. I may need to change what I was going to get him for Christmas.....

 

He wants to build a house that has the best chance of helping us withstand anything. "Anything" has never been defined during any of our conversations but I am sure what is happening now falls under that label. I wouldn't go so far as to call him a "prepper" but he does think being prepared and as self sufficient as possible makes sense in this day and age. To use our current situation as an example; we did go out and buy some extra food in preparation for social distancing several weeks ago before it was a definite but did not feel we needed to buy all the toilet paper we would need for a year!

The concrete dome wasn't his first choice but it is the best choice that fulfills his desire, is affordable and is something I agree is pretty cool. Here are his choices, in order, not taking into consideration money and our location.

1. A proper mid evil castle that is energy efficient (with a moat of course)! I think this is a leftover from being a kid and a history major. He has been involved in recreational sword fighting in the past as well (think souped up Nerf for Adults). He does own a replica long sword and uses it to weed wack pricker bushes! I think that makes his first choice a little more understandable. He is clearly not the only one because there is one 40 min from us that checks all the boxes.... but it was listed for sale for $45 million and is now off the market. Not really in our price range!

Click this link to check out all the real estate photos. 

2. An underground house. This isn't a bad choice if it is done right BUT we live in the wrong location for this to be the best choice. I personally prefer this option to the castle above but that is mostly because the castle seems like it would be cold. After researching we came to the conclusion that underground homes do best in hot, dry places that don't have a lot of rock (lots of rock makes it tricky and very expensive). Where we live is cold, wet and rocky.... so we moved on from this choice but there are some really cool underground houses!

3. The monolithic dome! At this point I don't think you need a picture of them. They were not our first choice of house but we hope it is the right choice.