Weatherproofing and starting back filling of our underground home (Building our Home Part43)

Ajouté : 2026-05-11

[00:00:06]Welcome back. Yesterday we got four more rolls of this black stuff up. That was not fun at all. Had a safety harness tied to the four-wheeler on the other side. And that stuff is super slick. And you can see the last row is a lot better because now we're up where we can stand.

[00:00:23]Got a pretty good crease here. But the whole idea is just that it sheds water so it will do its job.

[00:00:29]Now we're waiting for it to dry a little bit to finish off the two rolls on the top. So we started on the other side. We got the first roll done here. It's a little bit cold, so it really doesn't want to stick. So we're hitting it with the weed burner. That's working pretty well. Just heat it up enough that it'll stick. Concrete's cold. It's cold. But this is working.

[00:01:07]That's my redneck scaffolding, but keeps me from having to be trying to repel down off of that. In essence, I've got these two tie straps here so that it can't fall out that way. It works.

[00:01:24]This is wet.

[00:02:30]That's done.

[00:02:33]I don't want to say it was hateful, but it got old and we had a couple of tricks, but it never really got much easier. Uh the top obviously I mean you can tell just from how it turned out.

[00:02:45]The top was easier because you're up where you can handle it. But on the one hand it's getting cooler so it doesn't stick to the concrete as well but it sticks on the seams. It it sticks really well. So on the one hand it's better because it's cooler so you can put it down and it's not sticking to everything. Uh on the other hand it's harder to get it to stick to what it's supposed to stick to. So, I think ideally uh cool mornings and evenings and a hot day and then you put it on in the mornings and evenings and then let it bake on during the day. And I don't know if I filmed those, but I got those all wrapped up and then just capped them with some plastic to keep the snow from going in it. Show a couple of shots on the sides. There's the back side and you can see a couple of spots here.

[00:03:33]That is one of the things that we learned is you need to get this up as soon as possible because especially with the way this building is shaped, water gets underneath it and then it pools. I had to put a couple of small holes down in the bottom here to drain it out, but it was starting to pull it down. And we'll throw a couple of patches on that and that isn't going to hurt anything.

[00:03:50]But that's kind of why we've been scrambling to get this done because if you get snow on this sitting and then it melts, that's going to be a lot of water. And it's kind of cool. You can see it condenses because the concrete is cooler and then when it warms up during the day, it just condenses like crazy on that. And there is the front. So now that's all waterproof.

[00:04:17]Yesterday we went up and started taking the forms down on the front side and brought them down. Second time they've been used, so we just burned them.

[00:04:23]Brought these two stumps down also just to get them take a couple of fires usually to get them to burn down. also took all those logs that were over there and put them there. So then we had done we can start putting dirt over that direction. Move up to the front now. And I don't know if I showed it, but we also had from all the OSB that was up on the end here, we had a whole pile of that here we got rid of. So now we just got to take the plastic to the dump and then we're going to pull out that concrete and bury it in with the back way down in the back fill.

[00:04:56]I don't know if you can see the water running off of that.

[00:04:59]That's cool.

[00:05:01]Now it's waterproof.

[00:05:05]And then here, we pulled off all of the top boards and then the first board around the perimeter on this side. We've got three boards, all three boards done to here. But I want to pull all this concrete back and get it piled up before I dig out the footing to get to the, as you can see there, right down there, the next two boards. And we'll get those pulled up. Then we'll burn those also.

[00:05:28]So, I'm going to scrape all the concrete out of here and get it in a pile.

[00:05:33]There is all the formwork off the front.

[00:05:35]That went pretty well.

[00:05:37]Got our penetrations right here. And if I didn't mention, putting a bevel on those pieces in that channel, that was key. Basically, just you had to work a little bit to keep the first piece out.

[00:05:48]Then once you can get under it with a crowbar, they just popped right out.

[00:05:51]That draft really helped.

[00:05:58]There it is. All back filled. Still got some obviously some smoothing to do, but really I'm just trying to get things ready for winter. Get everything cleaned up, picked up. Yesterday we got all the formwork taken off of that and pulled up out of here. That draft for that channel part really made a difference down at the bottom. Uh it did get a little bit challenging in that some clay had run down so it was creating a suction. I actually had to drive a bar underneath it to get it pulled out, but we kept at it. Got that out. So at this point we got everything done this building season that we had hoped to. Now it's just a matter of getting things cleaned up and covered and then we start digging that out to see how much we can get stored underneath it instead of having to cover it out underneath the snow. But all that form work, that's the second time that it's been used. So we're going to go ahead and burn that.

[00:06:50]That's what I'll be doing today along with some other scrap and stumps that we have left to burn.

[00:06:56]So the plan today, I pulled out the wood that's still good. Most of that's the walking planks. We do have some forms that we have to do for the internal walls still. So, I want to reuse as much of that as possible. And then down here, I've got all of the form work that is beyond recovery. We're burning it along with a couple of these stumps. And then we started bringing this concrete down.

[00:07:18]We're getting piles of this concrete all over the place from all this concrete work. So, as I extend this out, I'm going to bury it underneath it. We were going to put it up in the big ditch beside the the house, but we really don't have a place to put it until then.

[00:07:31]And this is really cool.

[00:07:34]There's so much clay. This is where the fire was the other day. And this is clay.

[00:07:40]I would love to make a kiln and see if I can make bricks because the clay content here is so high. Just not enough time in a life. Maybe someday.

[00:07:53]Yesterday we started on that. Pretty exciting.

[00:07:58]I don't know if you recall, but that dirt mound came out here and ended about probably actually probably over in here.

[00:08:09]So, quite a lot of dirt taken out of there. Obviously, a lot more to take.

[00:08:14]And what I wanted to do here was get most of this dirt taken out here to it was getting into the drier stuff so that it could be screened because as you recall when we do the sides we put screen dirt. We put a screen here so that we end up with screen dirt up against that so it doesn't rocks don't bang it and poke holes and such in it.

[00:08:36]So, we'll take some of the first section of this scaffolding out or formwork and then start working our way back on that.

[00:08:44]And next, I'll show you where we're putting that dirt.

[00:08:48]Here you can see we've extended this section out where the excavator is sitting. We'll go a little bit further and then slope it down. Once we get an area underneath that building up there that's open, we'll be able to move all those blocks up. And then we'll continue the dirt out across here. also putting those blocks up underneath it.

[00:09:06]But the idea here is hopefully in the future this will become a nice flat garden orchard berry bush area. And then as I mentioned that once we have covered area will come down. I'll still use it for wood storage but I'll move it. Then of course all this firewood will go away. So, this whole area will be flat through here and then slope down on the end and this will be a nice big flat gardening area someday.

[00:09:37]This is pretty cool.

[00:09:40]Two days ago, I burned the last of the formwork and threw these stumps on them.

[00:09:45]And then yesterday, I pulled the fire went out. Well, not out, but everything had burned probably by 5:00 p.m.

[00:09:51]Yesterday, I pulled the stumps out, set this one here. This stump was still round.

[00:10:03]That might not have been a good idea, but as you can see, it's burning from the inside out.

[00:10:10]This morning, we got the first 8 ft of that cleared. All the OSB pulled down.

[00:10:16]Still got the plastic on it. We're going to leave that in one piece. We can use it to cover stuff over the winter when we take it down.

[00:10:24]And then removed all the wood back to there. So, next we can start digging that out.

[00:10:29]First, this is going to be the inlet vent for the boiler. So, I'm not sucking all the oxygen out of there. Or if I end up having to put the boiler over here, I can use it for any reason. If I have to put the boiler outside, I can use that to run the lines to it.

[00:10:46]We'll get that set up so we can start burying this.

[00:10:51]And you can see we started pulling that back.

[00:11:01]Probably should have pulled the plastic down first.

[00:11:05]We'll see.

[00:11:10]And then just like the other side, we're setting that screen up against there so that we get nice screen dirt uh right up against that membrane. And then just filling this A Heat. Heat.

[00:12:12]Heat.

[00:12:29]Heat.

[00:12:49]Heat up here.

[00:13:08]End of the day. Got some more dug out of there. That sifter is working awesome. I wish I could find a way to separate the small rock from the big rock because there is tons of gravel in that which would be great for the road and would help diminish some of the dirt that we have to do.

[00:13:29]We just about got this side.

[00:13:32]I just wanted to build the weight up here so we have equal weight on both sides. Obviously, this has to come up more. And we'll just use fill dirt coming across to do that. Still got this section right here.

[00:13:45]And then we'll be done on this side for a while.

[00:13:49]Probably start taking dirt out of here.

[00:13:51]Need to get this dug back so we can get those ICF blocks in here out of the snow load. And probably get try to get this dug back real quick. So, we'll take a bunch more of this dirt down there where we've been putting it down by the house or whatever that building is, get that even more leveled out and kind of cleaned up a little bit for before winter hopefully. It's currently somewhere I think it's somewhere around the 18th of October. Look at an old video. The first snow we had was November 11th, although it snowed and then kind of melted. So, hopefully we can get this get those blocks up into here and get that taken care of before everything's buried with snow again.

[00:14:29]But there's a trailer load of sifted dirt.

[00:14:33]Like I said, that thing is working great. End of another day. We just about have the first 8 ft dug out. Most of that. We went through about half of that today. Uh this afternoon, we finished this up this morning. This was what took quite a bit of time. Sifting the dirt to get it over against this. And then we'd put the rock and such and then put sifted dirt over it. And we're still going to have more on this, but that took quite a bit of time sifting it all.

[00:15:03]And this is kind of fascinating.

[00:15:06]You'll notice here we cut the plastic, but there's a gap right here. And it's pretty big. Let's go to the other side.

[00:15:14]And you can see as you look at that form and that OSB, it's bowed in. And that's what I was talking about, the formwork.

[00:15:22]If I look down this, you can see this bow in it. And we have the same gap right here.

[00:15:29]And I originally thought that it was just too much weight and it pushed it in. But I figured out what caused that.

[00:15:36]And it's pretty fascinating from a physics standpoint. So what happened is they shot about the first eight feet of this on the back side and then came and did the front side and then they did the next 8 or 10 ft on each side and they went back and forth. So what happened is this wasn't bowed when they first shot it and you can see the concrete doesn't have a bow in it. The concrete follows the arch. But then when they started doing the top and putting weight on it, all that weight caused the formwork to settle some. And because here, unlike on the shop where I left a gap between the pieces of OSB, here the OSB was budded right up to each other because I didn't want to have concrete coming through that gap. Well, as it settles, the circumference of that changes and so it pushed down and this had already cured.

[00:16:34]But because it pushed down, it caused the OSB and that form to buckle, whereas the concrete behind it isn't buckled.

[00:16:41]So, it's just from the weight of all that concrete until it settled, which is pretty fascinating.

[00:16:49]I'd be interested. I might have to go check and do some math and see how much linear distance because the distance of this on the inside is 60 ft but on the outside because in thicker the outside linear distance is more obviously but I'm curious to know how much settling happened. I would bet it's very little because it doesn't take much of a di uh diameter or circumference change to change the diameter quite a bit. And that's probably if you figure both of those, that's probably, you know, at best an inch difference in the circumference or the linear distance of that arch to do that on both sides.

[00:17:31]Probably an inch on each side.

[00:17:34]But pretty fascinating. And this is kind of interesting also when you're up there taking off that formwork, you're bent over, hunched over, hardly any room. Get over on the side, you can kind of stand up. Now that I've got this dug out and I look up.

[00:17:51]That is 17 feet over me now. [sighs] So you go. Yeah, it's going to be interesting when I get up there to hang those garage doors and those lights.

[00:18:03]Probably should do that before I take all the dirt out. And I'm not sure how well you can see that, but I really like that finish.

[00:18:10]It is where there was wrinkles in the plastic.

[00:18:15]And then of course you can see the standoffs, pieces of those every once in a while, but it gives it kind of a cool finished look or unfinished.

[00:18:29]So we got the first 8 ft dug out. Well, I left a little bit here. I've learned to not be trying to do your final grade until you're done. And I'd just be chasing that pile around.

[00:18:40]And then this morning we took the next 8 ft off and got it ready.

[00:18:47]So next we will start digging that out.

[00:18:50]This line that you're seeing right here going up and over is because every night the concrete cools then it warms up during the day so there's water condensing on it. And we just took that down and took the plastic off of it so it doesn't have water condensed on it.

[00:19:06]But once it's enclosed that'll stop.

[00:19:08]We'll get started on the next 8 ft now.

[00:19:11]Got eight done. Like I said, only 152 ft left to go.

[00:19:17]And there's the shot back a little bit.

[00:19:20]It's looking pretty big now.

[00:19:24]Uh I think last we had just cleared out the next section of wood, the next 8 ft.

[00:19:31]So you can see there we got it dug out.

[00:19:33]So we've got 16 ft dug out now. So, next we're going to start taking the next section of wood. Might actually take that's the last two sections because all the rest of it's done from the other end. So, might go ahead and just take all those out and then just take out the ribs and OSB as we need to cuz as you remember those ribs hold that OSB up.

[00:19:55]And there you might be able to see up somewhere right in there is the uh Jbolt I put in for the garage doors. And then there's one just back and down a little bit. That's for the lights.

[00:20:09]But boy, that is really starting to look big from the inside now.

[00:20:23]And then it's supposed to start raining today. So I just put this in here so that all the stuff in the back of the side by side doesn't get wet. But we're once again racing the clock. I'd like to get enough of this dug out to get those ICF blocks up. Uh supposed to possibly snow tomorrow. Little bit of snow won't be a big deal, but I want to get them up in here before we get several feet of snow stacked on top of them. Trying to get as much of this dug out. I mean, they'd all fit here, but then I wouldn't be able to keep digging. So, I'm trying to make it so that we can set them to the side so we can keep going over the winter.

[00:20:54]The last of the vertical supports are out.

[00:20:58]I guess if there was any doubt, it's freestanding.

[00:21:02]And there's that side other than the plastic which is hanging down which is obviously on the inside of the OSB.

[00:21:07]It'll come down once we get this OSB and these bars down. Both sides are now open all the way through. Now we're looking at the back side. We went ahead and pulled that back and then pulled all the formwork off of that. On the other side back back here, I don't care. That wood can decompose and whatever. The ground can settle here. There's going to be a pad. So I want to make sure we're going to fill this in. We'll water it down.

[00:21:30]use that compactor to pack it and it'll be probably quite some time before we're putting pad on this anyway. And then this is the dugout stub for the wall that matches the one on that side.

[00:21:44]Just dug this rock up.

[00:21:49]Well done, nature.

[00:21:53]25 October. Not sure if you can see that, but it's trying to snow down to 30°.

[00:22:01]sort of kind of stick. We're in a race against time to get those blocks up here and covered.

[00:22:06]I want obviously to be able to get those blocks under here, but also be able to keep working under here. Be nice to get some other stuff under there.

[00:22:15]Yesterday, we finished taking down all the vertical supports, all of the spars, all the OSB, and all the plastic.

[00:22:24]So, for the first time, you can see all the way through that.

[00:22:29]It was getting dark, so I couldn't film it when we reached that milestone, so I figured I'd come up today and shoot it.

[00:22:37]And then on this side, same thing. You can see up there where we've been stacking it all up on top maybe, but there's 72 ft of clear span, 47 ft across.

[00:22:53]Next, we'll take the next section of our ladder, we call it, down and pull those 4x4s up and start digging again.

[00:23:03]But this is pretty awesome. It's not really snowing, but regardless, there is zero snow on the excavator.

[00:23:11]26th October, 28° this morning. It's been trying to snow, but not really sticking, but it's definitely on its way. We're at a point now where the sifted dirt is just about high enough that it doesn't all fall down. So, and we obviously have a lot of dirt to dig.

[00:23:27]So, it's time to get serious about this.

[00:23:29]So, we spent yesterday building that, getting it set up.

[00:23:34]That screen, um, I like it. It's much bigger and not as fine as the back one behind here. So, it does a better job of sifting. It's much faster. So, we built that. That way we can come in with the front end of the skid steer bucket to take the fines out of it and it'll just be quicker. Uh I realize when most people do this, they take this piece that's like this and it's on its side and they tip it like that. I like it that way. It's longer so don't have to have a vibrator. All the fines run out of it and so I did it that way. Plus with the excavator I don't have a problem getting the buckets up to the top of it. [clears throat] The other thing, I'm going to leave those two up there long in case I need to increase the angle. It's the same angle as that one over there, which is for the smaller one, which we might use to try to screen some gravel out with that 2-in grid right there that fits on it. We'll see how that works. I'm afraid that the rocks were going to get stuck in it and not roll off of it, cuz that's not really how you sift uh larger. And then on the bottom, I'll come in and cut this off. Hopefully the sides aren't going to spllay out here on the front right here and over here. We'll see. Uh if they do, then I'll have to address that. But we're also going to set up a way to move it around with skid steer forks. I'll take care of that this morning and we'll put it to work. We also moved a bunch of those blocks up here yesterday.

[00:25:02]We thought about different ways to move this around. And what we landed on is we just cut some holes through there for both of these. They slide through and they catch that piece of wood right there. And you just move it around with the forklift. And then when you get where you want it, get it where you want it, you just slide those 2 by sixes back out. And then you just have the two holes over there. It works.

[00:25:49]I see those blocks.

[00:26:33]really.

[00:26:45]It's been doing this all day. That's a little bit too warm for it to be sticking real well. We'll see what happens tonight.

[00:26:54]And there's our pile of screen dirt that we'll start putting on there.

[00:26:58]And then we've also been using the 2-in screen to pull out some gravel just because this is getting really muddy right here.

[00:27:08]And it's free gravel.

[00:27:17]So, we're screening the fine there.

[00:27:19]Doing it for the rock here. We'll put that up on top of that screen dirt once we're not worried about it being up against the building.

[00:27:26]Didn't get a lot dug today cuz we're working on systems, getting systems that work. But I think we're getting there.

[00:27:33]And then if you saw the screen that we put in the trailer and it's tied into the trailer so that you can dump it.

[00:27:41]That's I was tying the screen down to the frame and it's tied into the trailer so that you can dump it with the screen on it and just leave the screen on the trailer.

[00:27:50]One last time you have to bucket the material that way.

[00:27:55]Not sure what all got filmed yesterday other than me precariously hanging off of that screen.

[00:28:01]But we brought a bunch of that sifted dirt up here and now that it's up a little bit higher and it's more level, I'm just taking some of the sifted dirt.

[00:28:09]Then you saw we were screening it just to get some base rock out for the road.

[00:28:13]And then I'll come in and I'll put the rock down here. And then I'll build it up. Do a little bit more dirt on that and just keep going that way.

[00:28:23]But that way we're And I know that the dirt's going to settle some down into this pure rock that I'm going to put here. That's okay cuz we can come back at any point and just put more fill to get the final sculpt that we want.

[00:28:38]Today is the 29th of October and we went in one week. We went from a high that just reached 60 to a low of 14° in a week. It is currently 17°. So, you can't tell, but I broke out my heaviest boots, my insulated pants. I have three jackets. One that's light, one that's medium, one that's heavy.

[00:29:02]We're on the heavy. The only thing I'm missing is my insulated coveralls over the insulated pants and probably going to be moving to those pretty soon. I think it's going to warm up a little bit. Obviously not up into 60, but this is quite a cold snap pretty early. But see, we've got that dug out far enough to get those backed in. Got another 8T there that's almost done. And as you saw, we have that side covered. And we're That's working really well for sifting the dirt. That's awesome. That over there in the trailer, nah, I can redo it and it would definitely be better, but we're not getting a lot of the gravel out of the rock anyway cuz most of it just bounces down. But I also brought a whole bunch of dirt up to here and put it on. And now we've reached a point because when you back fill these, you want to do it in lifts. You don't want to load one side up a lot more than the other side. So you can see I put down the sifted stuff. Then I come in and I put the dirt over it.

[00:30:03][clears throat] But, and I knew this all along, I've got to have a plan to get dirt on the other side. Normally, they come in with great big excavators that can reach, you know, halfway across. Well, we can't get an excavator on the other side. And then to do that, they have to build lifts. They have to build the dirt up. They have to keep building it up so they can get the excavator up high enough to reach over on top of that because again, the top of that is uh just under 17 1/2 ft. and an excavator isn't going to reach that far out and up. So, they're constantly building lifts. I think I have a solution. I'm going to have to build something. It's going to take me a little while to build it. And well, I'll get into it probably during the build and why I'm doing it the way I'm doing it, cuz there are several solutions you could use. And each one of them has advantages and disadvantages. But I think I'm probably going to end the video right here because this build is going to take some time to do to gather the materials and build. And right now it's just digging dirt and putting it anywhere we can.

[00:31:06]Actually, we'll close it out with replacing these. Ordered some of these.

[00:31:09]Actually, I ordered two sets. They're a little bit different. As you'll recall, maybe you go back to the first video.

[00:31:16]These were probably about from the distance from this tooth right here to it, they were probably about that long. And that's how worn down they are. That one actually has a hole in it. But thankfully, I didn't get down to where I was rubbing on those.

[00:31:35]But I got three of these in. We'll get the other two on, and that should make it dig a little better. [laughter] little handle is cuz that wasn't really doing it.

[00:31:54][music] There we go.

[00:32:03]There we go. New teeth.