Alright, so it’s been a while since I’ve last worked on the root cellar, if you want to call it that. I’ll be sharing pictures that make it look more like a death trap, or an enclosed underground swimming pool. It’s not that way now.
I’ve got little time to type this so I’ll make it quick. We put the roof over the root cellar, and it’s looking pretty good. I called an audible and went with a living roof. It will be supported by two layers of earthbag supports, some 2x10x16’s, some 2x4x16’s and 8 sheets of OSB. The inside is only 8×8, but the hole is around 12×12 and the space added up to 16ft of needed “roofage.” We could have EASILY spent $400 on this roof with the original plans, but with some creative thinking, we have it structurally sound for $250ish. I’ll be doing a light living roof using sawdust, hay, leaves, and w/e else I can muster up.
I’m going to show some pictures to really help explain what we did, which is essentially, lay down plastic, put a couple rows of earthbags down, laid the 2x10s down, and the square roof w/2x4x16’s going across every 16″ just like inside a stick built home. Obviously the 2×10’s are the lateral cross beams bearing the middle weight, while the whole of the roof will bear on the earthbags you’ll see pictured.
After all is said and done, we’ll lay an “umbrella” …ella…ella ey ey across and bury it 6″ or more to keep it super-uber dry. Then I may put carpet for extra protection, and more water proofing will go on the inside that I’ll discuss later.
Apparently I have the tendency to go “balls deep” into projects. My friend Morgan (who I couldn’t have built the roof without) was saying that there are other ways I could’ve gone about building a root cellar, why did I have to choose the all-out, balls deep method? I thought it was kind of funny, but also true. Regardless, this root cellar should be flippin’ awesome when all is said and done.
I’m obligated to say that my lovely wife also helped in rain proofing the osb for the moment. Thanks, babe!
Here are the pictures I took:
You can see my boot to see the size of these bags. We laid the 1 footers, not the 1 1/2 footers. They're 20 something inches long, and 3 or 4 inches tall.
Here you can see how flooded it got. It almost all out now.
You can see the bags supporting the weight of the roof.
Top of the roof.
I Dream of Dirt 