Starting the front wall of the house ... prepping roof rafters

Yesterday Stephen and I laid out the base round of tires for the front wall.

We finally decided to get the front wall built before we start the roof.  The Earthship books recommend putting the roof on the back of the building and then starting the front wall and greenhouse roof.  We do not want to leave the roof beams exposed and weathering while we work on the front wall so we've decided to build the front wall first.  We are currently figuring out door placement and pipe (sewer and gray water) placement, but hope to be filling tires in a couple of days.  This wall should go fairly quickly as it will only take about a hundred tires ...

Besides ... its going to take a bit of work to clean up the roof rafters.  We plan on using the round logs pictured at the left for the rafters and as you can see they are fairly weathered.

An up-close shot of some weathered logs.

We have started sand blasting the logs to clean them up.  The finished look is very attractive ... it looks sand blasted!  The softer wood gets chewed up by the sand, leaving the harder rings to stand out.

We discovered that sand blasting takes a fair bit of compressed air to  be effective.  Currently we have two air compressors hooked up to the sand blaster to make it all work.  We are borrowing Gary's (Sandra's dad) small sand blaster  and it works well.  The process is slow and the sand goes everywhere, just like on the beach!












We decided to sift our own sand and this is probably the most tedious part of the process.  We are getting fine sand from just up the highway.  The sand needs to be dried and then sifted otherwise it clogs the sand blasting equipment.  Fortunately, we have an enthusiastic crew on the job.