Hi, everyone.
My name is Becky Olsen. My husband and I have been researching
papercrete for a few years now, and have experimented a bit with it--
since we were renting a very small apartment and our landlord
frowned on messes in the yard, it was a very small operation.
However, we have recently become "income challenged," which
necessitated our moving onto a friend's acreage up in
the "mountains," into a 24' yurt that we constructed chiefly out of
free "imperfect" wood picked up from a local lumber yard. It's a
work in progress, and we're still dealing with leaky roof and tilted
floor problems, among others. After we fix those, we also have
plans for a separate bedroom yurt (our 15-year-old son wants to
build his own in the trees as a "tree yurt") and a few storage
yurts. Still looking for ideas--this is a very good site for
those!
Right now we are kicking around the idea of maybe erecting a
geodesic dome (such as the one spaceman posted on his site, made out
of conduit and papercrete triangles) and setting it on top of the
yurt walls, but don't know if it would be too heavy for the lattice
work to support. Especially considering the snow load they get up
here every winter. We are in the middle of a forest, which
definitely needs thinning, so we have a fairly unlimited amount of
posts available, which made the photos of the reciprocal roof very
interesting. I wonder if it would work on a 24' diameter (or more)
structure? How steep of a pitch would be needed, and how long would
the poles have to be? And how thick was the papercrete on top, and
was it waterproofed? And would it be as efficient at shedding a
heavy snow load as a dome would be?
For our future yurts, we would like to incorporate gabion "posts" to
keep us out of the water and mud, with logs laid on top as
underflooring, so we won't have to level another slab site (which
causes an immense amount of sticky mud). Right now we are using
some open-cell foam padding that we had in storage as wall
insulation, but I think papercrete would be much more effective.
Maybe if we poured 1' X 6' slabs they could be attached to the
lattice work in a circular pattern. Or maybe, as someone posted,
brick work would be best.
Also, I came across a site in the past which had a photo of a pond
made from papercrete on it. Haven't been able to find it since.
There is a small spring on the property, and we would like to
develop it enough to hold water to use for watering the grow-boxes
which are in the planning. Is there any info available that anyone
has run across on this subject?
Anyway, I'm really excited to find a site that has so many good
ideas in it. Thanks for the great info, all!
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