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Part V: 2008 - 2009
Building a Passive Solar Slipform Stone House
An Ongoing Journal of the Adventure with Builder and Author Thomas J. Elpel
Photos by Thomas J. Elpel
Be sure to read
Part I: April, May, and June 2005
Part II: September, October, and November 2005
Part III: March through October 2006
and Part IV: 2007
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 We finished the trimwork on the greenhouse. |
 It is great to see the lilacs in bloom. |
 We installed a greywater filtering system in the greenhouse. |
 We were thrilled to start planting the greenhouse. |
 Kris laid tiles in the window wells. |
 We built stairs up to the loft. |
 The railings are built with poles and rebar. |
 We also built stairs to the deck behind the house. |
 We began laying the brickwork for the masonry fireplace. |
 Building the arch for the fireplace. |
 The floor of the baffle system. |
 Building the first layer of baffles. |
 Doing stonework up the outside. |
 Close-up of the arch. |
 Clean-out doors provide access to the baffle system. |
2008 was a low-key year for construction on the stone house. We wrapped up a number of projects around the place, but like any home-building project, the closer we get to the end, the longer it takes. I spent January, February, and March finishing my new book, Roadmap to Reality. Kris and Sholei both visited for a little while and helped out with the house. Then we headed south for a three-week walkabout in Arizona.
We took a year off from the internship program, but Kris spent much of the year with us. He cut and cemented tiles into the wide windowsills around the main level, and installed light fixtures all over the house.
We completed the front porch, including plastering the walls, tiling the floor, and finishing the electrical work, plus we built stone steps up to the door.
 This is the stairway down to the greenhouse and basement. |
In the greenhouse Kris installed a greywater treatment system. Wastewater from the sinks and shower is filtered through a mesh bag into a fifty-gallon plastic barrel. The barrel can hold a large flush of water, which then trickles through a pipe into the treatment pond. Microorganisms on the gravel break down pollutants in the water before it is discharged outdoors for irrigation. We also embedded potted plants in the treatment pond, to water them hydroponically.
It was exciting to plant the greenhouse. We grew a nice crop of salad greens and tomatoes over the summer, with more still coming on for winter.
My daughter Felicia got a puppy in the spring and carried him up and down the ladder to the loft as he got bigger and bigger. I finally built a stairway, using some interesting willow logs as posts. I purchased some rough-cut Douglas fir wood for the treads and installed pine boards as risers. For railings I used lodge pole pine, with 1/2" rebar spaced about four inches apart for balusters.
We also finished the stairwell to the basement, which included plastering the walls, sanding and finishing the wood treads, and tiling the landing.
 Two sets of doors on the greenhouse double the protection from winter cold. |
We poured a concrete deck on the metal framework behind the house, using miscellaneous junk wire for mesh to tie it all together. My son Donny helped out with the project. I mixed an odd assortment of leftover paints together into a large bucket, then added a can of paint to each batch of concrete for strength and color. We poured most of the deck with straight concrete, then added a thin layer of mortar without gravel over the top and hand-troweled it smooth.
A critical component for keeping the structure warm is the airlocks on every entry. The front porch airlock is now complete, and so is the west end of the greenhouse. We check the thrift store for secondhand sliding glass doors and French doors every time we go to town. The west end of the greenhouse has a sliding glass door on the outside, with a French door on the inside. That way we can close both sets of doors in cold weather. It takes a little patience to wait for the right doors to show up at the secondhand stores.
Our internship program started up again in October when Matt bicycled out from New Jersey to visit. I met Lauren at Rabbitstick Rendezvous and she came up to spend part of the winter and tan hides. Lauren plastered and painted her bedroom in the basement. We also built stairs up to the back deck and started gathering truckloads of rocks to build the fireplace. Matt and Lauren both left in January, then Kris returned for awhile. We went car camping and bicycling in Death Valley in February, then Kris took Donny canoeing down the Colorado River for three weeks, from the Hoover Dam all the way to Yuma.
 The completed brickwork for the masonry fireplace and baffle system. |
Building the masonry fireplace was the big project for the spring of 2009. Joseph flew out from Saint Louis, Missouri at the beginning of March and stayed for six weeks to help out with the masonry work. Joseph worked as a civilian contractor doing aircraft repair in Saudi Arabia and Iraq through most of the Iraq war. I corresponded with him via email over several years about masonry fireplaces, and he was excited now to get the chance to do a hands-on project.
The masonry fireplace is also known as a masonry heater or Russian fireplace, and has a series of baffles to extract the heat from the exhaust. The woodbox door is often placed on one end and has a solid metal door. However, the style we build has a fireplace-look with a glass window in it, so I use the term "masonry fireplace."
We built our first one ten years earlier in our own home. This was my first chance to try out the next-generation plans outlined in my book Living Homes: Integrated Design and Construction. One of the key differences is that the new fireplace is positioned against the garage wall, with a glass door in the house and a metal door in the garage. Instead of hauling firewood into the house, and making a big mess along the way, a person can take a couple quick steps into the garage and put the firewood in from that side.
While our first fireplace was built at ground-level, the new one is suspended above a full basement. The finished fireplace probably weighs between 15,000 and 20,000 lbs., so we definitely needed good support to prevent it from falling through into the basement! For support, we formed two wall stubs out from the perimeter wall when we poured the basement a few years back. The fireplace also rests on the perimeter wall, so it is supported on three sides. The first step in building the fireplace was to pour a heavily reinforced concrete slab, with rock-facing around the edges, to connect the three supporting walls. We used 5/8" rebar and a lot of it, to tie it all together.
 Vacuuming up bits of mortar from our stonework. |
In my first fireplace, we only mortared the brickwork for the arched fireplace, then did stonework around it and supported a baffle system of dry-stacked firebricks above that. I'm not sure if that was a good idea or not, since it may be possible for the unmortared bricks to shift over time. Fortunately, we have not noticed any problems in our first ten years.
The plans in Living Homes are designed with mortared brickwork all the way up, including chambers on each side of the firebox to support the baffle system, so that all of the brickwork can be completed before doing the stonework up the outside. That is definitely a more professional approach than our original design, although it proved to be more work than I anticipated.
Interestingly, the mortar joints are supposed to be very small when working with fire bricks and refractory cement. The mortar is used more as a filler than a binder, and so the joints should be no more than 1/8" thick. It took some practice to learn how to do that, and many of our joints are larger, especially mine. Joseph seemed to have the better knack for doing thin joints. It was also necessary to soak all of the firebricks in a bucket of water, since they are super-absorbent and tend to pull the moisture out of the mortar right away, if not properly soaked beforehand.
 Working on the chimney. |
We started with several courses of flat brickwork, than built formwork for the arch. Although it takes some time and skill to do a nice arch, I like this part of the process the most; it seems more organic and out-of-the-box compared to the flat and square brickwork. We designed the arch so that the top of the brickwork came out level with the courses coming up the sides, the made the floor for the first level of the baffle system.
The baffle system consists of six horizontal runs starting with the exhaust from the fireplace in the middle. The smoke splits and runs to the outsides, goes up and comes back to center on the next level, with three sets of these out and in baffle pairs. We installed three clean-out doors on one end of the fireplace to access each of the six horizontal runs. The ashes are scraped from the top level down to the next level, on down until they fall into the firebox.
Although I can go months without eating a candy bar, Joseph and I started treating each other with candy bars from our store next door. Some days we were eating three candy bars each, which can really pack on the pounds in a hurry! It was kind of fun to indulge for awhile.
I filmed the building process, which added some time and complication to the job, but we are putting together a how-to video about building masonry fireplaces. I hope to have it out before the end of the year.
 Joseph stands by our monument. |
We completed the brickwork all the way to the top, perfecting our brick-laying skills along the way, before we started the stonework. Then we started back at the bottom and did stonework layer by layer up to the top. Weather-wise, I think it snowed about every three or four days while Joseph was here. It was great to get all the moisture, since we really need it, but it makes the masonry work more challenging, especially when the rock pile is covered in snow. Since the batches were small, we mixed most of the mortar with a hoe in a wheelbarrow in the greenhouse.
We eventually ran out of rocks and had to get another couple truckloads, which was a bit of a problem, since there was still too much snow in the mountains to get back to our original source. However, we found enough rocks nearby that were similar in color, so they seemed to blend well in the fireplace. We finished the stonework of the fireplace and ordered custom-made doors before Joseph went home in mid-April. We did the stonework up the wall beside the fireplace after that.
 Adding doors to the front and back completed the fireplace. |
We will be doing a lot of survival skills and walkabouts over the summer, but hopefully we will make some additional progress on the house. Slowly but surely, we keep pecking away at the rest of the projects.
If you are interested in some hands-on building experience and would like to help finish this house, then please click on over to our Green University, LLC internship program. Interns have stayed with us for as little as a few weeks on up towards most of a year, and some have returned again and again. Class instruction is mostly informal. For the most part you will simply learn by doing, but you will also be able to ask questions and get advice along the way. We will provide you with meals and floor space to sleep on. You will need to bring your own sleeping bag, plus work clothes and other clothes to change out of at the end of the day. It is more than just a chance to learn about alternative building techniques. It is a (small) commmunity of like-minded individuals, and our discussions about everything in the universe are one of the key benefits to the program.
Check out Living Homes: Integrated Design and Construction.
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