The Tale of a White Pine
(Building the Dome)

        Before there was even the idea of a house, there were trees and bushes.  Most of them are still there.  Here we show the house being built behind one of the original trees on the property, a  white pine (Pinus strobus).  To make its position more obvious, the trunk of the pine has been colored red in the pictures where it appears.

In order to build the house, we cleared an area just large enough to fit it in, leaving the rest of the property undisturbed.  The well was dug at the rear of the house location, the remaining stumps were removed, and the ditches for the footings were dug.  In this first picture, the future driveway  was little more than a mud path.
The plans for the house called for an extensive array of footings, designed to support all exterior and interior walls.    The water table is so high in this area that the bottom of the footing in one area was right at the water level.  Needless to say, a basement was never considered a possibility.  In this picture and in several of those below,  you can see a second, larger tree to the right of the white pine.  This is a large shagbark hickory  (Carya ovata)  which we chose not to cut down, and actually repositioned the house so that we would not need to.  It has returned the favor by raining down on us all sorts and manners of crud, virtually all summer long.
 


The foundation walls were constructed of concrete block which followed the pattern of the walls on the first floor, making a very complicated arrangement.  In order to avoid the bottom of the swimming pool sitting in ground water, we added one more course of blocks to the entire house.  The plumbing was roughed in, and the entire foundation was then filled with sand and gravel, topped off with sheets of plastic and finally reinforcing bars.

The swimming pool arrived on a truck, and was lowered into its place.

It had to be in place before the slab was poured.  


Fortunately, we had good weather for the pouring of the slab.  All in all, it was a pretty big piece of concrete.   In the foreground of the picture is the garage, which is required to be a few inches lower than the rest of the house.

Shortly after the slab had set up completely, the dome kit arrived on a large flatbed truck. We hired a neighbor who had a forklift to unload the pieces and move them back to the building site.


The dome framing went up pretty quickly with the help of son-in-law Mike. The procedures were outlined clearly in the instructions which came with the kit.   The importance of scaffolding cannot be overestimated;  it would have been virtually impossible to accomplish much of the work without it.


After the sheathing was placed on the dome, it was possible to remove the stabilizing struts which up until now had been positioned over the openings to the future extensions. (The large pits are for the planters for the palm trees and other tropical plants which were eventually placed in the foyer.)
We then began to add the extensions, of which there were five: the foyer and front porch, the living room (which is shown rising at the right of the picture), the dining room, the guest bedroom (showing a bit at the left), and the pool room.  The most complicated of these was the pool room, which because of its length required additional steel supports.

 
When the extensions were complete, the garage was framed out, and the sheathing (half-inch plywood) was put in place.  Then the entire roof area and all walls were covered with tarpaper. 




Roofing the Dome:(Click here for more on roofing)

The roofing (asphalt shingles)was then begun.  This was a huge task, which probably took us longer than any single step of the construction. Click on the picture to take a short side trip to see the roofing underway.
 


At the same time we were roofing, we were covering the tarpaper on the walls with an exterior plywood facing. On rainy days and very hot days, roofing did not seem to be possible, so we did things inside.


Interior Work: (Click here for more)

Click on the picture to take a short side trip to see some of the inside work. When all the facing was in place, we started to paint it the Cape Cod Grey that we had decided would fit best with the grey bark of the trees. Since this was winter, painting was restricted to very warm days.
We hired a neighbor to level out the driveway , using the sandy dirt which had been dug out during the installation of our septic system..   We then had him spread grey stone over the dirt, so finally we had a real driveway (and less dirt in the house).

At long last the roof was done, and there was at least one coat of paint on the outside. 
 
And after a very long time, our dome house became our home (not a moment too soon.)
But most important, of course, the white pine came through it all just fine.

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