In order to bury the office apse at the front of our earth sheltered home, I needed to build a retaining wall with a window in it. For this corner of the build, I decided to use CMU’s, Concrete Masonry Units, AKA concrete blocks. We also had to insulate the apse structure.
I may come back and add some detail here. For now, I’ll just post the video and gallery of pics to tell the story.
The Video
The Gallery
Here are some pics to help tell the story.
Sherri getting a selfie
Sherri and I decided to roughly imitate the “American Gothic” paining.
Sherri and I decided to roughly imitate the “American Gothic” paining.
Couldn’t hold the straight face
And back to work…
Camera caught a block drop in mid air and I thought it looked worth keeping.
Michael’s turn to get a selfie
We put 4 inches of XPS between the apse and the retaining wall. This first 4 feet were easy because of the simple curvature.
My mother faithfully working on the insulation dome.
Here Michael is cranking away on the dome. You know this process is decent when an 11 year old kid can crank it out.
Posing with my subway vinyl. In theory, you are only supposed to use these with the image downward, but I couldn’t resist.
We glued the vinyls together with HH-66 vinyl cement. It basically melts them together with a chemical bond.
Perspective…
Here you can see that the insulation layer completely separates the inner and outer walls. The rebar and lath were covered in concrete, ferro-cement style.
It was getting dark by the time I got that concrete up on the eyebrow.
The insulation mosaic was rough looking, but functional.
Go pro caught this fun one as I drove by… I guess I was looking at the camera to avoid driving over the tripod.
I have always been a big fan of Copper roofs, especially when they patina. Copper roofs last hundreds of years and just look so much more interesting than asphalt ones. Problem is that they are just too expensive. But with my earth sheltered home project, I was going to have very few square ft of roof, so copper suddenly became affordable again. Making the tiles myself would also significantly reduce the cost. For this first part, I was really just wanting to put a copper cap on the front and back ridge of the garage. This post is about how I did that. At some other point, I may also make diamond tiles to cover a few hundred feet of regular roof… But first, this video
The Video
Alternatives
I had put stucco on the front and back of the garage and this ridge cap was to cover the 12-inch ridge along the top of the shotcrete wall… Looking back, I could have done it a few other ways. For instance, I could have just wrapped the top of the wall in lath and then just put stucco right up over the ridge. Another option would have been to put tile up along the ridge.
I had planned to use copper shingles for all the skylight caps also, but now that I am older and wiser, I plan to just cap the second skylight on the garage with copper and switch to using large format tiles (that I can get for about 1$/sqft) on the other 5 skylight curbs.
The tools
The Press Break Roll was pretty fun to use and getting it 40% off from Harbor Freight made it even better. One of these days I’ll put more details about it under the “tools” section of this website and maybe make a more focused video. In the meantime, I can put the original crate back on top of it to keep the dust off so it is ready to use next time I am in the mood.
Along with that, I needed a nice mallet for pounding the copper, good aviation snips for cutting it, pliers, etc. Generally speaking, pretty standard stuff.
The Gallery
Pictures help tell the story, so I put a bunch in the description of each image… Enjoy.
Here is my new press break roll. It weighs about 300 lbs and I was taking a break after getting it from the back of my truck to the top of the wheel barrow. Next I would need to get it up onto that wheeled cart I made just for this purpose…
Here I am using the Press function of the Harbor Freight Brake-Press-Roll to cut pieces from the copper coil.
The Brake on the Harbor Freight tool worked pretty well. Here I am lining up the second point in my fold line…
This front cap was my first attempt, lessons were learned as mistakes were made along the way, but I still enjoyed it.
Here is one of the tiles from the first section… Mistakes included that I didn’t fold down the top corners of the tabs, so they got in the way as the tiles started needing to curve back down… I also didn’t make the drip edge significant enough…
Here we are coming up the north west side…
The Go Pro caught this shot of me looking tired but satisfied after finishing the copper cap on the front of the garage.
Here is a close up of the last tile on the front. You can see the rivets used to hold it all together (in addition to the folds)
This section of the FoxBlocks leaked a bit and made an ugly lump that would have shown thru the copper. I chiseled it out and refilled with smooth mortar. Here Michael is troweling it off.
The Go Pro also caught this pic. Not sure why we are both looking at the camera. Maybe it was on purpose. 😉
The copper after it was placed over the smoothed ridge…
The day after shotcrete on the perimeter walls, we got started on prepping the steel arches and setting them up for another round of shotcrete. This particular apse is special because it will eventually be my office (where I will spend most of my waking hours), and because it needs to be in (along with its retaining wall) before we can bury the garage side of the house. The work was all pretty simple compared to the bedrooms, and I didn’t take much time to stop and take pics, so this post should be short. But first, the video…
The video:
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Apse
An apse is the semi-circular end of a vault. They are pretty common in earth sheltered homes because they can hold a lot of load, but usually, they are at the back, completely buried. I put mine up front and included a window. Hopefully, it turns out to be a good idea. This apse will also be my office, and I spend a lot of the time on video conference calls, so hopefully, the acoustics are OK. At least my head will be near the window and not near the acoustic focus point.
The Gallery
This is how the guest room looked the morning after shotcrete.
It looks warm enough in the pics, but the temp was probably less than 40 and freezing over night. I left this propane heater in the room to keep the roof warm while it cured.
I was pretty happy with how the mud room roof turned out…
This is the top of the playroom apse. Because it was out in the open, it also needed its own little parapet wall…
Hunter checking on the camera as he flipped the steel arch. He had welded 3 sides of each leg, but needed to flip it to weld the 4th.
Positioned the first arch here and took a quick pic just to get an idea of the scale of the office…
The office apse steel at the end of the first saturday…
Here I am looking quite grizzly, but happy things are working out.
Office apse with mostly just the horizontal rebar.
Michael messing with the camera… He likes moving past it very slowly so it looks like he is moving normal speed and the rest of us are high speed.
Snow stopped our progress for a couple months.
Snow…
Sherri did most of the lath work during a brief warm spell in February… Sorry, no timelapse.
