Chapter Twenty Four: Deep Foundation — Part 5

Joe marks out a foot from each corner with his red wax marker, “This is where each wall will start. Don’t brick past the lines at the corners. I know none of us has ever laid brick before, but this should be second nature by about the middle of the first wall. If you fuck up and put the wrong brick in place, we can fix it without taking down the whole fucking wall, so don’t freak out. Just tell George, and he’ll put somebody — Jynx — to fixing it.”

Joe has everybody standing over George’s plans as he talks, and is pointing at various places marked on the plans, places that have matching red mark lines on the foundation.

“Windows will be set six bricks in height, and will be eight bricks wide. We’re using double pane pull open windows with hard block and lock systems for the bedrooms: Only in rooms I have marked with red lines. There will be no windows on the north wall, because that is the storage room. Sorry Heath, but your room won’t have a window facing out into the world either, as it is set to the interior. You will have a ladder to the roof, and a break point through the copper, in case you need a way out in an emergency.”

“Sounds like fun.” Heath says, not sure what emergency could warrant her needing to dig through the roof.

Joe finishes explaining things, like the water to cement ratio needed for pasting the blocks, and the importance of keeping the bricks level and flush, and then the walls start going up. The brick laying proves to be time consuming, and the crew will spend weeks laying brick, setting the corners of the building with a pipe post set in concrete, and laying the outer brick wall with the thinner masonry block, meant, apparently, to provide protection for the first. The corners will be made of poured concrete, Joe tells them, molded and built up in layers, the ten total corners and six center posts can only begin being set once the walls are done.

To ChoCho, the most interesting things to notice are the solutions to problems he hadn’t considered, like how Joe and Blake build up wood framework at the wall joints: How they use wood separators inside the airspace so the walls can be sealed together without becoming one solid unit. He had not considered that they would use concrete, built up in layers to create the exterior and central supports for the roof, or that they would build up a fireplace from stone masonry and a franklin stove that would dispatch its chimney through the very center of the roof structure, using rock and concrete to hold heat between burns.

By the time summer nights start to chill, the crew has raised the roof beams, made of hard wood, pressure treated and impregnated with resin, into place against the center posts and all edges. Finally, working down each side as quickly as possible, Kevin, ChoCho, Daria, Joe and Blake hammer thin copper sheets into place with copper nails over resinated plywood, a technique modified from a book on homesteading. There are four nails per copper sheet, the planks not complaining in the slightest as the crew hammers home. The plank supported plywood surface is white with sealant, and each copper sheet has a tacky undersurface that is exposed quickly before hammering so it can seal itself to the scale of copper beneath it.

The days pass as they lay the plating. The roof becomes solid, the rain tamping on the plates, which include folded overlays for the bends and base. The copper goes on in layers shining brightly in the sun, losing a little more of its shine with every rain. As the roof goes up, Jynx makes short work of setting the windows so that the glass within its metal frame opens out toward the end, and shutters against the cold are fixed from within. The inside of the windows will have pillows cut for them that will prove useful as insulation during the colder winter months.

The plumbing, made of thick copper pipe, is set in place and sealed with silicone, then taped with gaffer’s tape at every joint. It is the best solution the crew can come up with for the absence of welding supplies. The kitchen and bath are tiled and all plumbing fixtures are working from the cistern, long before winter sets in. The inner walls are still being put in place with the coming of the first snow, but the house is firm now, and everybody is sleeping in the commons, around a warm wood stove whose orange blaze never seems to dim. The inner walls are mostly plasterwork with an inner structure made from various materials that include adobe blocks, hollow glass bricks, transparent glass bottles, and random pieces of ornate stone. In some places like the bathroom and Heath’s room, squared off canning jars are honeycombed with plaster and frosted so that light can pass in without allowing an image to pass back out. In Heath’s room these became something like windows, adding to the lamp hanging down from the ceiling, set high above walls that stop at ten feet no matter the height of the roof above them. In other rooms, glass cubes act both as structural support for corners and to allow light to transfer through the walls. In most rooms, a small space is left open so Gryphon can wiggle through.

While Jynx and the others finish the walls, Joe and Blake dig out the septic tank, set a distance from the house, and ready a cistern, set up with a funnel top and mesh catch to keep mosquitoes out. The system is run and pressurized by an electric pump and and air compressor. The pump and compressor are in turn powered by windmill, and the water is filtered via a custom design that Blake devised from his memory of the filtering system he had used for treating water on board ship. Though the septic tank and cistern only take a few weeks to set up, setting up wind and solar power proves to be the last work done outside before winter’s end.

By December, electricity is run to every room, and work comes to a slow halt. Nearly complete, the house becomes a place of warmth and comfort, its larders full, its rooms private, its bath water scalding and fed by two fifty gallon boilers. Solar cells and wind power in place, the batteries charged, the storage room full of food, people start to settle, and though nobody else has paid much attention to the time of year, or to the fact that this could be seen as a time of considerable success, Heath decides that now might well be the best time to declare a holiday.