Dometastic

Not much happened again this week. Our standard construction documents arrive tomorrow. We are still planning to have a meeting with the town before we hire an engineer. After more discussion with Monolithic I don't think the town will let us use an out of state engineer as if it was prefab. BUT, it doesn't hurt to meet with them and ask how much detail they need before going to get new engineering quotes. Monolithic has been helpful in trying to figure out how to make engineering the house go a little smoother. They sent us some generic engineering for a 32 foot dome (our house is several 32 foot domes that overlap). That at least will give our engineer a solid place to start. It will also help us in hiring an engineer because now we can actually show them what needs to be done. Talking to engineers about the dome wasn't the same as talking to finance people. Read about my ridiculous experience talking to banks about construction loans HERE . Instead, I just felt like...

The search for an engineer is on hold. I spent the week talking to engineers and it became pretty clear that I need to talk to my town. My goal is to see if they will accept the fact that the dome is a stock shell design. I would be great if the town could treat it a bit like a prefab home. This would be the easiest and cheapest solution. It is sort of prefab and sort of not. It depends on how you look at it and doesn't fall firmly into any category.  The airform (the big inflatable version of your house) is made in Texas and shipped to the build location and then assembled. The materials that can easily be found locally are not shipped but it is still sort of  prefab. All the engineers I talked to encouraged me to see if the town will accept it as a prefab before we go any further. This would allow us to have the engineering of the superstructure be done by the people that do them all the time. I don't know for sure, but since this dome layout has already been built by Monoli...

Not much is happening as far as house plans go this week. There is some good news, some bad news and a roadblock.  Good news is we will get the finalized set of "standard construction documents" from Monolithic very soon in the mail.  Bad news is there is apparently a whole separate structural engineering step that still has to happen. I was mistaken in thinking that was part of the current documents. My lack of knowledge shows plainly again. The roadblock is that the structural engineer that Monolithic usually uses isn't licensed in CT. So now we need to find our own that will know nothing about monolithic domes. So far only one quote has come back and it is more than 3X the cost that Monolithic says is typical. I feel like people view a monolithic dome as a super expensive custom home because it is unfamiliar. This causes many of them to see dollar signs when they think they might be part of the project. I had a friend assume we were building a million d...

This week my post isn't directly related to building the dome. We did get our 4th draft from the designer today (and it is very technical) but I was mistaken about the engineering being part of it already. What we have completed at this point is a full set of "standard construction drawings". I didn't realize there was another (even more technical) step. Just goes to show how little I know about the process of building a home. I am not sure if we should wait to go to the town until this next phase of the drawings is complete or go now. I will contact the town this week and ask them. Warmer spring like weather has allowed us to begin working on the property much earlier than I expected. I spent a few hours clearing a path around the old barn in the woodsy area of the property in preparation for its spring makeover. It was slow going doing it by hand. I found 5 deer ticks on me after my effort. This was a bit of a surprise to me since it is still winter. For the rest ...

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...