Original subtitles

Good morning everybody out there in TV. This is Bob Venn with What's Going On Here.

And we're at Murtaugh Hill. If you don't know where Murtaugh Hill is, just stay tuned.

We're going to tell you all about Murtaugh Hill. We're going to talk to you about Rob Roy.

We're going to talk to you about earth homes. We're going to talk to you about wood homes.

We're going to talk to you about windmill power. We're going to talk to you about sun power.

We're here for an in-depth look at another way of living without the gas and electric of whoever we talk about.

We won't mention any names, but electric companies. They make their own electricity here, and they built their own home.

It's going to be very interesting, and we're going to find out why it's called Murtaugh Hill.

Calvin Castine has the camera, and it's a nice, cool, sunny day just off the turnpike behind West Shazie.

This is the man you've heard about many times, Rob Roy. Good morning, Rob.

Good morning, Bob.

Where are you from originally?

Well, I was born in Massachusetts.

What got you up into our area?

Well, before we came here, I was living seven years in Scotland. That's where I met my wife.

And we decided we wanted to pursue a self-reliant lifestyle, so we embarked upon a land search all over the United States, visiting some 35 states.

And in all the places that we went to, I guess the North Country seemed to suit our needs and personalities best.

We like the people. We like the climate, the four seasons, the price of land.

You know, it's a safe area, but you're able to pursue a self-reliant lifestyle here.

So you didn't know anybody in Platsburg area to get you here?

No, thanks.

Just driving around.

We were driving down the turnpike.

We saw beautiful land along the military turnpike, and we stopped to talk to one of the local farmers who had his name plastered on all the posted signs.

Well, he wasn't willing to sell any of his land, but he knew of this land up here in Murtaugh Hill.

So he put us on to the owner, and that's how we got up here.

We were talking. What is the name Murtaugh Hill?

Murtaugh Hill.

The Murtaugh's from Ireland settled the hill in the early 1800s, actually, and John Murtaugh.

There were actually Murtaugh's up here until the 1930s, and then the hill was more or less abandoned for quite a number of years until there was one summer camp up here.

And then back in 1975, a few families got together as a result of our finding the land here.

Now there's about 15 families living on the hill.

It's 1975's the time you were doing this?

Yeah.

20 years already.

That's right.

And so you bought this one piece of property on the hill?

We bought 64 acres. We had an option on another 180 acres.

And while we were living in Scotland, we put an ad in the, not an ad, but actually a letter in Mother Earth News, magazine of the day.

Uh-huh.

And we had over 90 different replies to that letter saying, you know, that this land was available for people to take the option on it.

The seller wasn't even charging for the option.

It was kind of a free option thrown in with purchasing 64 acres.

So the list kind of worked its way down to 12 families, and ultimately six of them, of those 12, from all over the United States, ended up buying property here on the hill.

And since that time, another six or eight families have moved in.

Is there an association at all? Are you an association?

No, it's very loose. We think of ourselves as a community as opposed to a commune.

Uh-huh.

Everybody owns their own land, has built their own house.

Many grow their own food and supply their own energy with wind and solar.

Now, do you have an outside job at all?

Oh, this is my work.

This is your work.

Earthwood Building School is the way we make our lives.

Okay. Earthwood, there it is, right there. Building School.

And the picture of the property.

We're right in the sunset.

Calvin, let's take a short break here, and we'll be right back.

We're right,

Well, getting into depth.

Now, you came up here.

Was any of this cleared at the time you arrived?

Well, this particular piece of property was a two-acre gravel pit, which a man had, you know, raped in taking the gravels about four or five feet of gravel off the top surface.

Then he must have hit a clay layer, and instead of going deeper, they spread laterally around the site.

So, our line of thought here on this particular piece of property was to reclaim this two acres of the planet surface and make it green, living, oxygenating, useful.

You know, we grow our gardens here.

We've reclaimed all this back to the tree line.

Right.

And say you want to build a tennis court.

You can hardly justify tearing out topsoil and trees to build a tennis court.

But if you've got land which has already been used for a gravel pit or something like that, gee, you can make a tennis court.

So, did you have to bring more dirt in here?

Topsoil?

No.

We brought a little topsoil in, but not a great deal, actually.

Grass will grow in pretty sandy soils.

It's not more than about an inch of topsoil here right now.

But look at the green grass.

Yes, very much.

Very much so in here.

You're in a complete little clearing.

How much land do you own yourself?

On this piece, there's six acres.

And we have another 20-acre wood lot across the road.

So, when you're burning wood, you're burning your own wood?

Well, we burn some of our own wood.

All the wood in that pile we cut this year just doing a little clearing.

Uh-huh.

But I also find that it's worthwhile to buy scrap wood from the sawmill where pallets are made, and it burns very efficiently in the masonry stove, very low in cost.

And we actually bought our firewood last year, and it only cost us $75 to heat for the winter.

Now, did you go to one of these schools?

How did you learn to make the first one?

Twenty years ago, there wasn't any information available on cordwood masonry construction.

Uh-huh.

There was one or two mentions in old books like Eric Sloan's Age of Barnes.

We saw an article in the National Geographic, 1974, that wasn't about cordwood.

It just happened to show a cordwood house in Washington State.

We saw that.

We said, gee, that makes sense.

We could do that.

But when you tried to search and find information, there wasn't any.

So the same fellow who sold the land to us, he was an old-timer from Dannemora, was interested in cordwood masonry or anything a little unusual.

He built over 90 houses in Dannemora himself, had a wood shop there.

And we went up to Canada's Ottawa Valley and searched out some of the old, found some of the old cordwood houses that were built in the last century,

talked to some people, and one day found a farmer actually laying up a cordwood barn on a Sunday afternoon,

had a chance to talk to him, get a few ideas.

And then we built our first cordwood house, which is down the road.

And as there was no literature on it, we wrote a book about cordwood masonry.

And I've written two more since then about cordwood masonry.

Where were you residing while you were building your house?

While we built the first house, we built a 12-by-16-foot shed and lived in the shed for seven months while we built the first house.

Then you sold that house?

So this is not your first one?

No, this is our third one.

And you sold the others?

Yeah, sold the others.

In fact, that little building there, the 20-foot diameter round building, would be a great temporary shelter for somebody to build,

to get the practice, to see if they can do cordwood masonry, make your $500 mistake there instead of your $5,000 mistake on the main house.

You think that's possible?

Oh, yeah.

Make mistakes?

You could build it.

I make them all the time.

You do?

Yeah.

Yeah, you heard it here first.

Oh, no.

My books are full of my mistakes.

Yeah.

Why should you go repeat my mistakes?

There you go.

You got it.

The whole point is to share my mistakes as well as the successes.

You'll go find your own mistakes, Bob.

There's plenty of them out there.

So a little 20-foot diameter building like that could serve as a temporary shelter.

Later on, after you've built your house, you could tough it out in there for a year or so, a young couple or whatever.

And after they've moved into the house, it becomes a guest house or a workshop or some other useful outbuilding.

See, I thought you had built a basement and then the frost had made it rise because all the grass on the roof.

How did that grass get on that roof?

Well, of course, you put the earth up there and all we do is plant seeds.

What's the reason for that?

And the grass comes.

Well, the earth roof is the longest lasting roof that you can have because it protects the waterproofing membrane from the two things that break down every other roof.

Which is ultraviolet deterioration.

That sun beating down on an, say, asphalt shingle breaks it down over the years.

And also something called freeze-thaw cycling.

Which is, like in the North Country here, you'll get 30 or 35 freezes and thaws, freezes and thaws.

Every time that happens, you actually get a breakdown of your shingle or whatever the roofing surface is.

But when you put your insulation on the top side of the membrane, that keeps it warm.

It isn't subjected to those constant freeze-thaw cyclings.

Okay.

So the two things that break down a roof are eliminated with the earth roof.

Built properly with the correct layers in it, this is the longest lasting roof that you can build.

So it's there more than for insulation.

It's just kicked up the roof and breaking down.

It's not even a particularly good insulation.

Okay.

There's actually styrofoam under there as well, which is the insulation.

If you want additional insulation, it's actually more cost effective to put on an extra inch of styrofoam than to put on an extra foot of earth,

which would be what you'd need because the structural cost of the, you know, imagine the weight of a foot of earth.

Yes.

And the structure needed to support that would be far more expensive than to just put an extra inch of styrofoam.

Okay.

So the earth is there to return that section of the planet's surface back to living green, oxygenating greenscape instead of dead, lifeless moonscape.

And it also provides cooling in the summer.

It provides protection from sound, radiation, storm, wind, etc.

Aesthetically, it suits the building.

If you're going to have a earth-sheltered house, why not have an earth roof on it?

Right.

All right.

We'll take a short break.

We'll be right back.

We're talking with Rob Roy.

We're talking about Earthwood Building School up here.

And maybe you'll,

Something you're interested in, at least to know about it. You may not want to live in one or build one, but you certainly want to know about it. It's been going on for 20 years.

Now, Rob, we know it's not always like father, like son. Now, you may, you know, you're all for returning to the earth. Was your dad like this?

No, he wasn't, but he was a very innovative, he was actually an inventor. And I'm sure he would, if he was still alive, be very interested in what we're doing.

My son has taken it even further. He's outflanked us in terms of energy efficiency and eating properly and growing his own. He's responsible for the garden this year.

That's his garden, yeah.

Yeah, he's 19 years old, and he's taken this thing even further.

Was your dad living when you first came here?

No.

Okay, because I was wondering, he must have said, what's something wrong with my son?

Well, my mother said that.

Your mother, well, you're honest, your mother. But is she still alive?

Yeah, she visits here. She was here this summer, and she enjoys it.

Has she learned to love it over the years?

Yeah, I would say she has a good appreciation for it. She has a totally different lifestyle down in Florida than we have.

Of course.

But, you know, after you've been here a few days, you realize that you're, it's kind of a gentle down lifestyle here.

You're not taking inordinate amounts of the world's resources to pursue this.

How many children do you have?

Two.

A boy and a girl?

Two boys.

Two boys, yeah.

They're 19 and 9.

Uh-huh.

The 9 must be really something else. He's learning from his dad and his brother.

That's right. In fact, when his brother was 9, he was actually teaching Cordwood workshops out in Chicago with us.

When we went out there to do some workshops, he was teaching the kids out there when he was 9 years old.

Now my other son is 9. He's very interested in this. When we have workshops here, we just finished a big workshop.

Calvin was here during the workshop.

He mentioned, explain a little bit what we're talking about. What do you mean a school? What do you do? And where do you get your people?

We get them from all over the world, actually. We're probably better known nationally than we are locally.

Just to give you an idea, of the 12 students that came this past weekend, I think about 8 of them were from Canada, 6 from Ontario and 2 from,

Actually, there were 2 from Quebec as well. And there were 2 from Alberta.

And then we had some people from New Jersey, Connecticut, New York.

So we get them from all over. We've had them from Germany, from Venezuela, California.

How long is your school? How many days?

We run 2, 3, and 5 day workshops.

Cordwood Masonry, Earth Sheltered Construction.

This year we did some solar workshop, 3 day solar workshop.

You don't have a video operator like that?

Yes, we do.

You do have one?

We have a video on Cordwood Masonry, which is available through the building school here.

It's a step-by-step instructional video. It runs an hour and a half.

Okay, that's very helpful today. You can keep referring, you know?

Well, our students like to have them because it's a way to follow up on what they learn during the 3 days.

It kind of is a concise workshop right in the tape, you know?

So they come here.

Yeah.

And where do you have your classes?

Well, it depends. Different classes we've done in different places.

Over the last two years we've been helping a family build a house down in Black Brook,

and so that's about a 35-minute drive from here.

We've been taking the class down there.

I see.

But this past weekend the work's got up so high that I feel a little worried about my students climbing up and down scaffolding,

so we're back on the ground for this workshop, and we actually, Calvin was here to film and showing the little workshop.

Okay, I haven't seen that, right.

What age group?

Oh, boy. We had a 14-year-old student this past weekend, and we had a 71-year-old lady came up here.

And we've had them up into the, you know, 80s.

Yeah, yeah. Big variety.

Oh, yeah.

Now, my first thought, and I know nothing about this. I haven't read your books. I've seen your books.

I would have said, your house, is it round? Would you say it's round?

Oh, yeah.

It's about as round as you can get.

Okay. Well, I thought I'd heard from somewhere that you had 16 sides, but that's not,

The roof has 16 facets.

Thank you, pardon. Okay.

The cordwood masonry is round.

All right.

The roof on that building has 16 triangular facets. The roof on these other two buildings have each eight triangular facets, so that would be an octagon on top of the round.

All right. I would assume that when you put this house up, you've got it exactly at the right angle for each room to get the best effect of the sun or whatever reason you've done. There's a reason that all the glass faces this way, and I guess that's because of the south.

Well, the house is very accurately laid out.

That's what I did.

A friend of mine in Plattsburgh, George Barber, is a retired surveyor, and he helped us lay this building out. And the true north-south axis is right through the middle of the building here. So this south-facing solar room is getting all the potential solar gain that there is.

And in addition, there are 32 rafters that are aligned with the 32 points of a ship's compass cards, precisely so that you can find stars or planets by going to the correct rafter. You get 32 points around the compass card. Perhaps you've seen a ship's compass card?

Yes.

And if you know the angle for a certain star or planet at a certain time, all you need is a declination, and you can go to the correct rafter and find that star. The stone circle there is laid out in much similar sort of a way. We have various celestial observations that can be taken to the stone circle.

Looks like another Stonehenge when we came in.

Well, yeah. Stonehenge is one of my favorite places.

Is that right?

We'll be there again in about 10 days from now.

You'll leave it? All right. Now, like your stones that are standing here, is that art more than anything else?

I think it's art because it's a beautiful stone.

Yes.

But the art was performed by nature, not by me. However, this is where you stand on the longest day of the year to catch the sunrise. If you come right back here.

If you lean against this stone, you'll see an alignment of four stones. Come try it out here.

Yes.

Look right down through the middle, and dark in the distance, there's a stone that's in the shade now, but it's on the edge of the forest. It's a standing stone.

Oh, I see it, yes.

Yes. That's where the sun rises at 522 in the morning on the longest day of the year.

And so you're sitting right through the center of the circle.

Just that one time?

Two or three days.

Two or three days.

Okay, yeah.

Either side of that will work, too.

Now, you don't mean the one over on the left under that tree. You mean over to the right?

That's straight on the alignment.

Okay.

Right through the opening here.

Right through the middle, through the opening.

Yep.

Now, the stone that you're referring to on the left is where you stand on the shortest day. Again, you sight down through the center of the circle, and the sun sets over this pointed stone here. And again, we have the forest cleared behind it so that the sun's orb is kind of just standing on top of that stone. And that happens at 333 p.m. on December 21st.

So you come out and do this. You look forward to doing that, I assume.

Yeah.

You do it each year?

It's an excuse to get a few nutsy cuckoo pipes together, have a beer, watch the sun set.

Well, there's nothing pushing it too much, either. You don't have to be,

I'm a born-again pagan, actually. This may not please a lot of your North Country viewers.

Well, no. So the reason for it being here, in addition to the art part, is for this reason right here.

Well, the ancient stone circles, of course, had these alignments built into them.

And it was so that they knew when to plant and when to reap the crops.

How many times did you move it before you got it in the right place?

Well, you do it right the first time, Bob.

Oh, get out. You've got to make a mistake, don't you? That day, you do it that day?

The year before, you just set up two sticks on that alignment.

Oh, all right.

And the following year, it's just the same.

Okay.

It doesn't take a rocket scientist.

Well, no, but you're not speaking to a rocket scientist, either.

But consider that the ancients didn't know what that day was.

Yes.

They had to study it over a period of time.

Okay.

I know by the calendar what the shortest day of the year is.

I look, you know, December 21st.

Okay. You've got the longest and the shortest.

Any other things you use here?

Yeah. We've got a true North alignment.

Yes.

From the tall stone on the right.

Yes.

Right down through the center over that tall stone on the left.

Uh-huh.

That is an absolutely true North alignment.

So every night of the year, you can lean against the South Stone and see the North Star, which,

of course, is the only fixed star.

The only one that doesn't move is the North Star.

The others all orbit around the North Star.

And you can see that straight over the North Stone.

Every night that you have, you know, clear skies.

Okay. We'll be going in your house, I take it later.

You're going to show us around.

We noticed the gate here.

Is this something that you use more than just this one?

Just to stop people from driving right into the near part of the house.

Yes, yeah.

All right. That's right.

I've got some wood coming today. I'll have to just move that.

Uh-huh. You don't cut your own wood?

I do. This, as I say, that pile, that was in the act of clearing some land.

I didn't think you'd go out and buy wood.

Well, it's actually, it's hardly worth for me to go out and buy my own wood when you can get it at such reasonable price.

Okay.

You've got to factor in the cost of bouncing a chainsaw off your nose, as I did once in my lifetime, and these sorts of things.

Oh, yes. That's dangerous.

I saw one write-up of the cost of a quarter of wood was $33,000.

That factored in the hospital stay at this point.

Yeah, yeah. Were these buildings built first or second, your smaller buildings?

The big one was built first.

First. And these are your storage buildings?

This one here is a bookstore.

The next one is my workshop, which I also write my books there.

To get peace and quiet, I can go out into the workshop, and I can fire the stove up in there before breakfast,

go in and have my breakfast.

An hour later, the building, even in the wintertime, is of sufficient temperature to work in there.

I get peace and quiet.

The little one on the right is a sauna.

That was built second.

After you finish building the house, you're dirty.

You know, you need to take it.

So you have your sauna you can go into. And we have another little building you probably haven't seen. It was my son's little, you can just see it there. There's a little playhouse there.

Yes, also made out of the cordwood.

Same thing.

When you talk about using the glass in the winter to heat your building, it makes me think that you're also heating, and you don't want to heat it in the summer. How do you keep the heat out? Shades or special?

Well, of course, not as much comes in in the summer because the sun is higher. So in the winter is when the sun goes deep into the house. Then in the summer, we keep the sliding glass door unit closed so that the heat doesn't go into the house. In the winter, we open the door during the day.

There's a separation you're telling me in there. Oh, yeah.

Oh, okay. All right. It doesn't go right directly into the house proper.

Yeah.

All right. Okay, we'll take another short break. I'm going to go over here and see if I can see that sun. I'm going to have to come back at night or something, I guess.

This is a good example of moss edge roof, too.

Okay. This is the playhouse that your son built. How long ago?

Well, 12 years ago. He was seven.

He was seven at the time.

His friends helped him. They were seven. There was one girl, I think, that was 10 or 12 that was working on it.

And then he puts the dirt up there. That's been there.

After the building was done, Jackie and I put the earth roof on.

And it's quite remarkable that a little building like this, which costs $10 to build, can support a heavy earth roof.

And it's been doing that for 12 years.

You've got the same kind of building with the triangles?

Yeah. This is an octagonal roof on a round building.

This is six feet in diameter.

The log ends are only five inches thick.

Solid mortar joint all the way through.

Notice the kids put marbles in there.

There's places that you can look out through.

There's some of the,

Yeah, you can go inside.

First of all, you said it was $10.

Tell us again.

30% of the cost of the building was this brass plate.

For $2.98 and a couple of Raisin Bran box tops, you could send in and get them.

Okay.

Here you can see the pipe that they have where,

Or bottles.

Are those bottles?

There's some jars with covers on them so the kids can store stuff.

Some of the log ends remove, you know, so you can kind of use it as a playhouse.

The kids go up on the roof now.

More recently, we added the ladder up onto the roof in the back, and that probably cost more.

The ladder probably cost more than $10, but the original building was about $10, which was just leftover cement, some plexiglass in the windows, and the rest is scrap lumber.

And when you say five inch, you mean the depth here?

Yeah.

Five inch?

This is a two by six right here, and the cordwood is cut five and a half, about five and a third inches.

There were 16 inch pieces that were cut.

Okay.

He's using a level to go up and down, make sure it's straight.

I set up the door frame for them and set it level.

And the kids just, yeah, they worked with the level from the ground on the slab.

Seven years old, you know.

What a great experience.

It's something they can always look at.

Is there any deterioration at all over the years with this?

No, there hasn't.

As a matter of fact, you see, we gave them log ends which we didn't feel were good enough to put in the main house.

This deterioration right here, notice how this little,

Yes.

This deterioration here was there originally.

This hasn't further deteriorated in the time that the house is built.

In other words, these log ends I would not use in a house that was for permanent occupation.

If you start with sound wood, keep it up off the ground and have a good overhang in the building.

And this isn't the best example right here.

Yes.

Your cordwood will never rot out because it breathes through on end grain.

Okay.

Because this don't have big enough overhang, you're probably saying.

Right.

You want that type of overhang.

It's also kind of close to the ground.

What about termites?

Don't bother that?

Well, termites don't like to go into end grain.

I would say if you keep it up on a slab and put a termite shield around the edge.

And I don't think we have termites up here in the North Country, but they do build cordwood

houses down in Georgia and North Carolina where there are termites.

They incorporate a metal termite shield around the slab.

And then, of course, just walk around the building and monitor and find out what's happening once

in a while.

I always turn that question around because I get asked that question all the time.

And I say, what about termites in an ordinary 2x6 frame house?

If they get in there, you don't even know they're in there.

They can cause a powerful lot of damage before you even know about it.

In the cordwood wall, they get a 16-inch wall.

They're resistant to the end grain anyway.

Plus, you can just walk around and see what's going on once in a while, which you can't do

with your other house.

How many homes are you responsible for in North America?

Any idea?

Gee, that's a tough one, but I'd have to say over 100 anyway.

Certainly.

I'm certain I'm on firm footing when I say over 100.

So when you make a trip and you go for a vacation, do you visit a different home?

We just went out to Wisconsin.

We conducted a three-day workshop in northern Wisconsin.

And then we had, on the way out, and then the day after the workshop, Jackie and I visited

a number of cordwood houses that I don't say we were responsible for, but we helped them

with our literature and courses or whatever to build them.

Okay.

I guess while we're here, just a minute, Calvin, you're in the right direction.

Tell us about your windmill.

Well, we get all our energy from wind and solar power.

Most of it, I'd say, comes from the wind in the wintertime.

Most of it comes from the sun in the summertime.

And spring and fall, you get, you know, it's a good hybrid system with maybe something like

50-50 wind and solar.

But we're not connected to the power company up here.

So people say, how much of your power do you make?

Well, of course, the answer is all of it.

We just, we consume less than the typical American household.

Now, we were down, there was a priest in the area from Uganda, and he was talking about

having no electricians.

You know, we went down to Peter Allen's house.

Good friend of mine.

And we saw his solar.

We didn't look at, we went in his house, but we only went in to see the battery.

We didn't look at his house or anything like that.

And that was interesting.

So we know a little bit about the people who are watching, know a little bit about the solar.

And he had mentioned that windmills work good, but of course they have to be repaired more

often than a solar.

If I were starting again, the way things are today, I think that it's actually more cost

effective to go straight solar and leave the wind out of the equation altogether.

Although having said that, in the last five years, there has been a new technology of wind

power where there are smaller and lighter windmills.

I'm waiting to see what the track record is after another few years.

But this is a heavy windmill.

This weighs 165 pounds.

And it gets boring taking it up and down to repair it.

Well, you know, I was thinking, you're nice and thin.

I don't know if that's because you work hard or you have to stay thin to climb that ladder

to get up there and get that thing down.

Well, I don't do that too often.

And I enjoy being up there, actually.

You know, you can see Montreal.

Get out of here.

Oh, yeah.

A day like this, a clear day like this, you would see St. Joseph's Oratory in Montreal.

I'd get a picture and I'd look at the picture rather than, that's got to be some climb up there.

Well, Calvin could take the camera up.

Well, we were going to,

Take him up there.

You can really see when you get up there, I bet, though, huh?

From halfway up to the wind plant, you can see the skyscrapers of Montreal.

Now, do you tip that down and get it back up there?

I wish I could.

You actually climb that and put that back up there?

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

165 pounds.

Yeah, and 108 feet up.

Do you use it?

You must use a rope that,

Yeah, it's called a gin pole.

You fasten the pole to the tower.

There's a pulley in the top of it.

You actually hoist the windmill up first and then lower it down.

Yeah.

Wow.

That's like an operation you need for four or five years on your body.

You just hate to see the time come when you've got to work on that.

I don't mind going up and doing simple maintenance, but, you know, when it comes to taking it down and having it prepared, it's,

Oh, yeah.

Really, this is why I say I advise people now to start with a couple of photovoltaic panels.

Now, instead of paying an electric bill, they can add,

It's a modular system.

You can add on to it and get extra panels.

Yeah.

You can't do that with wind.

You're kind of stuck with what you've got.

Yes.

No, there's not much.

It's not blowing much today.

How much do you,

Of your wind, your power, do you get from this?

Did you mention 40?

In the winter, we get a good portion of it.

Maybe three quarters.

But in the summer, as you can see today, it's not doing much.

Well, you've got the sun today.

Yeah, you've got the sun today, but it takes a good power wind to make a lot of energy from the wind.

Don't you wish you could store this sun for,

Get a whole bunch of batteries and keep storing them, and then you wouldn't have to worry,

We store it for a week.

Well, that's right.

But to be able to store it for a month, you've had a lot of sun this year.

You don't go more than a week without either sun or wind.

You don't, huh?

Okay.

You're going to have one or the other.

So you have to be conservative in the house, or within reason, right?

You are,

Yeah.

I think everyone should be, whether they're connected to the power company or not.

Okay.

We're just using far too much energy in this country.

All right.

Let's go to,

It seems a little bit more,

We'll take a break.

We'll talk about your books in here.

We'll talk,

We'll see your house.

Yeah, we'll talk a little bit about that.

Okay.

We're talking at the home and property of Rob Roy and his family.

I've heard that Rob Roy goes around in circles.

Well, everything here is in circles.

Even the wood starts with the round pieces of wood.

His home is in a circle.

And over here, Calvin was saying,

I don't know how you get power out of this circle here.

Even his trampoline is a circle instead of being the rectangular one.

We can bring that trampoline under the circular dome for the wintertime

and the kids use it through the wintertime.

They do, huh?

Yeah.

They get a lot of use out of that?

Well, the youngest one does.

Uh-huh.

Yeah.

Now over, that's another thing, you don't have a lot of, where do you go to school here?

Where do the children go to school?

Northern Adirondack.

The bus come up on the road?

It does, this was the first day of school today, the bus was up at 7.20.

Is this a town road that comes up here?

Oh yeah, town road.

It is a town road. It always has been a town road, even when you first came?

It was a town road for, at least from the 1800s on, and then for, as I say, 30 or 40 years, there were nobody living on the hill.

There were five farms up here, and then they finally, in the 1930s, they left.

Old Mrs. Murtaugh, she died in the last few years.

She was in Plattsburgh until the late 70s, but she remembers, she could tell you about living on the hill in the 1930s.

You're telling me that there's farmland up here, open fields?

There was five farms up here in the hill.

And back in those days, the woods were cut, you know, they had farms, these were fields.

You can see the stone walls in the field.

Yeah.

And back in the old days, the people in West Chaisy could look up on the hill and see the houses, but of course you can't even look at the trees.

Okay, well now, you had mentioned, I guess, before, and I knew you had the land against it.

What's that called?

Earth-Berming.

Earth-Berming.

Earth-Berming the house.

And then we were off camera, you said something about up to 40%?

40% of the cylindrical walls of the house are earth-Bermed.

You don't get that sense when you approach the house.

No, you don't.

It looks like a big two-story house.

But we'll take the camera around to the north side, and then it looks like just a hill.

Yeah.

With hardly any house in it at all.

Right.

And what's the reason for that?

It sets the whole house into a more favorable ambient temperature.

A steady, it keeps the house cool in the summer, it keeps it warm in the winter.

You know, on the ordinary house, you've got to be 90 degrees warmer.

If it's 20 below zero, say, and you want it to be 70 inside, you've got to be 90 degrees

warmer inside the house than it is outside.

If it's 40 degrees in the earth-sheltered portion of the house, which is the natural temperature

that you'll find when you get down to 6 or 8 feet, then you've only got 30 degrees to

go to get you from 40 to 70, instead of 90 to get you from 20 below to 70, you see?

So you're starting off much better off.

It's like your house is in South Carolina instead of Plattsburgh, New York.

Okay.

And you do that on the north side, because that's where the sun isn't?

Well, you want to take advantage of the solar gain on the other sides.

Yeah.

So your earth-burning takes place on the north side, sure.

Okay.

And you're making use of your stones here.

You're piling your wood, drying your wood here.

Well, that's actually bonfire wood.

We occasionally, in the center of the stone circle is a fire pit.

Uh-huh.

We can, during our workshops, we always have a bonfire night, a campfire night.

That's where we run the car.

People sit around these sitting stones, you see?

Yeah.

When you talk about someone coming to your classes, do, they're paying for this, obviously.

That's part of your income.

That is your income.

And do they bring their families?

Sometimes they do.

One of the groups this weekend was a husband, wife, and their 14-year-old son, and he participated fully in the workshop.

Sometimes they bring little kids, and one of the parents will look after the kids during the workshop or something like that.

Yeah, we do have families, but mostly couples or single people.

You buy an old barn somewhere and get these?

Boy, I don't remember where those came from.

You know, those eight?

They weren't good enough to use in construction, and they're not really great firewood either, so we use them during the bonfire nights.

Where did you get these stones from originally?

They're all indigenous to Murtaugh Hill, except for the one I showed you earlier.

That came from the Rainbow Quarry in Burke, New York.

But these others, this is the underlying strata, is the anorthosite granite.

And that's two billion years old, and it's amongst the hardest rock on the planet.

The overlying strata, though, is this pink pot-stamped sandstone.

You notice this one is cracking up.

The others are quite strong.

And that's, you know, when the Champlain Sea covered thousands of square miles 33 million years ago,

it laid up a strata of sandstone, the bottom of the sea.

Sometimes you'll even see the beach fossil left in it.

I can show you an example of that in the house, and you'll find fossils in there.

But that's the overlying strata.

It's only about 30 million years old, as opposed to 2 billion years old on this stuff here.

Did you cut these stones yourself?

Get them out, or have someone do it for you?

Back in the early 1800s on Murtaugh Hill was the West Shazey Granite Company.

And there's a quarry down at the bottom of the hill.

You can still see some stones that were not removed.

But I suspect that what happened is the stones weren't breaking cleanly.

If you'll notice that stone there, it broke on an angle, you see?

They didn't all break cleanly.

I don't think the granite had a good cleavage to it.

So I think that's why they moved on.

There's better granite quarries around the Placid.

I see where the holes have been drilled.

See where you've got the sides here?

Well, that was when Irish labor was cheap and dynamite was expensive.

What you would do is, you'd actually drill several holes along the granite,

then drive in a hardwood peg in that.

Now, the holes would be drilled maybe 16 or 18 inches back from the face of the granite.

You'd drive in the hardwood pegs, water the pegs down,

and the expanding wood would actually break off the face of granite.

It would take a while to expand.

I don't think it took all that long.

I think in a day or two it would break off.

Yeah, that's soon.

Now, for instance, here, as the rain falls in the summer, or winter rather,

it melts with the sun.

It's going to go down, and the frost will also break this.

That stone's been there for about 10 years,

and I suspect 20 years from now it'll have to be replaced.

The frost is going to break this stone up, and I'll replace it.

Okay, and you have a little heater in each one of your small buildings.

Well, the sauna, of course, you can get that up to 160 degrees.

Take you in there, show you that.

Okay.

We'll be right back.

We're going to move around as we go along here.

Now, whoa, what's this white container over here in the trees?

That's propane gas.

We use it for refrigeration.

We cook on it.

In the summertime particularly, we have a wood cook stove for wintertime.

Our water heating in the summer comes from propane gas.

When you're using alternate energy,

you're using much lower quantities of electricity

than you do in a typical American home.

Any device which has a heating coil,

such as a water heater or an electric range,

is a tremendous consumer of electricity.

But it makes more sense, actually.

It's more efficient to use propane gas for those purposes

than it is to use electricity.

Okay, so you do use that.

Yeah, our utility cost here is about $300 a year,

and that's mostly propane gas.

We have a telephone.

We have the propane gas.

As I said, that's about $300 a year.

And then last year, we spent $75 for our firewood.

Okay.

We'll be right back.

And you can get a better view after.

You know, the first thing I think of,

he mentioned this is farming up here,

six farms up on the hill,

and all this land.

And he owns six acres,

and he's got built-up gardens

like you would have if you were in a city

or in an apartment or on a roof.

What's the reason for this, Rob?

Well, it's called French intensive gardening.

You grow,

The entire surface of the garden

is growing vegetables,

and you can even alternate leafy

with root crops, for example.

We have people find it strange

that they'll see a cucumber.

Here's a corn stalk with a cucumber

up near the top of it.

You know, so how can cucumbers grow in a corn stalk?

You're growing your cucumbers in with the corn.

The corn acts as a trellis for the cucumbers.

It's complete intensive gardening.

You can get a lot more per square foot

without rows that you're tilling

than you can in the rows.

Plus, it's easier to work on.

I mean, it's easy to weed it.

There's not much weeding because,

Yeah, you've got crushed stones all around you.

It's nice and dry.

There's no much room for weeds to get in

because it's so intensively planted with vegetables.

Okay.

And then, of course,

it's at a level that's easier to work at.

You're not right down on the ground.

And finally, we irrigate it with this porous tubing

so that we can water from the rain barrels by gravity

or we can use the bicycle pump watering system

to water the raised beds

from just riding the bicycle,

pumps the water,

and brings it into the raised beds.

So you've got this tube snaking around in here.

Never are the plants any more

than just a few inches away from the water source.

And, of course, you're probably aware

it's much better to water the roots of a plant

than it is to water the tops

where a great deal of water is lost by evaporation.

Evaporation, right.

Now, there's tin inside of here.

Right.

So this is what makes these beds last so long.

This is aluminum flashing right here.

Okay.

So the cedar logs are actually sitting on the crushed stone.

So they're not sitting in the soil.

By the same token,

the soil, you notice,

does not go right up to the cedar logs either.

Yes.

You've got that tin flashing.

All right.

So these four beds here

are actually about 14 years old

and they're still in pretty good condition.

These are newer here.

Do you have holes in the metal flashing in the bottom?

No, there's no metal flashing in the bottom.

Okay.

On the bottom is 6-mil black poly plastic

with holes punctured in it

so that you're not creating a swimming pool effect.

You don't want to have a wet, muddy situation

so the water can drain out to the crushed stone.

Okay.

Lessons here even on raising vegetables,

not only in building houses.

And you've got your little tomatoes here.

You've got all kinds of,

What is it?

You canned?

Yeah, they're making salsa right now

out of these tomatoes.

All right.

Is there some significance to this big log?

Yeah, that's one of these great big ones

that we were cutting slices off of.

It's a piece of bombagia,

which is like a cottonwood type of tree.

And that one had a rotten section in one quadrant

so I couldn't make,

So we're making a rocking chair out of it. Once in a while when I'm looking for something to do, I sand work on the rocking chair. Someday that'll be about a 400 pound rocking chair.

You made your own chair here too?

Yes, my son Rowan made it.

Adirondack, whatever you call it, type chair?

That was his first effort at a rustic piece of furniture.

Very good, yes. Will he be doing this, you think, now as his living in the future?

Rowan this year has already taught courses with me in North Carolina, and he'll continue to do that. And you should come and see the sauna.

Okay, we'll go see the sauna. We didn't need a sauna much this summer, I was in a steady sauna.

The camera's still on, I think, as we go down through.

This is 10 feet in diameter, outside diameter.

Uh-huh. And this has the stove right in here.

Yep.

Right.

And of course you fire up the stove, and you heat up the bricks, and you can get this building, even in the wintertime, you can get it up to 160 degrees without any trouble at all.

In 160?

160, 160. And then you sit here, and of course the sauna is a dry heat.

Some people like steam, they put a little water on the bricks, and it can steam.

On the bricks, yeah.

But what happens is the dry end grain of the cord would soon take the moisture right out of the air, and you're right back down to a very low humidity.

How long do you stay in here? 160 degrees?

Oh, maybe 160, perhaps 20 minutes or so.

And if you want a breath of cool, fresh air, you can remove a log like this, and get a breath of fresh air.

There's one on each side, so that you can get a cross-draft.

Yeah, another one there.

Got the electricity in here?

Yeah, it's just one single 12-volt bulb in here.

AC or DC?

All our lighting circuits are DC, but we do have 110-volt AC circuits for small appliances.

Okay.

But that electricity is made from an inverter, from the batteries through an inverter.

Say that again?

An inverter gets 12-volt DC in one end of it, and by a miracle of technology, spews out 115-volt AC out the other end.

Okay.

You're taking your solar power or your windmill power.

All that works in 12 volts.

And it stores into batteries.

Yeah, batteries are 12 volts.

So you're storing your power in 12 volts, but then you might want to run a VCR or a microwave or something.

We actually run our washing machine on an ordinary 115-volt circuit.

But the inverter takes the battery power and inverts it to regular house current.

How long does it take to get this going and get 160 in here?

In the wintertime, 45 minutes to an hour.

That quick, huh?

Yeah.

Okay.

In the summer, you can get pretty hot in here in a half an hour.

Can you show us any construction here on the wood that we might see as well here as any other place?

For instance, you mentioned, I know on the other TV I'd seen or program I'd seen of yours, you mentioned a lot of cedar.

Well, this is a lot of old fence rails.

This is mostly split cedar fence rails.

There's a few pieces.

These are hardwoods right here.

Uh-huh.

These are split cedar fence rails.

These are cedars that were cut off of our property.

I know each of these logins on a first-name basis.

Yeah.

See the apple here?

Yes.

Oh, yes.

And then there's Pac-Man over on the wall.

Okay, here, Pac-Man, yeah.

The students like to put different design features into the wall.

There's Pac-Man, yes, yes.

And the marble here and there to break up.

Yep.

And are you very select, when you're putting this up, are you selective in trying to make sure that you don't get all round ones in one area and things like that?

Well, I like a random rubble style to it, and we try to keep a constant mortar joint between the log ends.

Uh-huh.

Now, on the top, you've got them lengthways rather than the others.

Is there a reason for that?

I had the logs.

They were left over from someone's log cabin.

It was a convenient way.

You get an eight-inch rafter here, and those six-inch milled logs just conveniently filled that space with the one-inch mortar joint top and bottom.

So it went very quickly to do that.

You know what, the thing that surprised me the most when you're building your 16-inch walls is that you don't have mortar all the way through.

No.

You just have it on the inside and the outside.

We can see that.

Okay, we'll see that.

All right.

We're looking at the gutters because I see the rain barrel down here.

So the gutters go all the way around the 16 sides of that roof, come down the rain gutter, and go into the old wooden barrel.

Yeah, it's an oak barrel, Jack Daniel's whiskey.

Okay.

And then what, you've got two exits here.

This is just an overflow.

If the thing is overflowing out the top, you get more water than you can handle.

You can open this valve and send it into the footing drains.

It gets carried away.

It isn't used.

But normally what you do is you have this one closed.

You fill the barrel up, and then to water the garden, you open this valve.

There's some water in there right now, as a matter of fact.

If I open this valve, water goes down into that porous tubing and actually waters the garden.

You have several of these?

Two.

A two-barrel carburetor.

Yeah.

So you see, everything is done.

And now, when they get wear out, is that when you make your flower barrels, or do you do that ahead of time?

This will last a long, long time, that oak barrel, right?

Yeah, I think it will.

No, we bought a number of these oak barrels, and some of them we made into for flowers.

All right.

All thermopane windows here, I take it?

Okay, we're going to walk around and try, Rob's going to show us in a logical order as we go.

Well, I'll take you to see the building that we're working on right now.

You'll see a cordwood wall actually torn apart.

Okay.

I can start to just,

Okay, well, let's explain what we're looking at here first, huh?

Well, this is a little,

Okay, we've moved out into the wooded area, away from your house, a couple hundred feet.

And what do we have here now, Rob?

Well, this will be a little cabin for people that come to the building school,

they want to stay on the site, and they can actually, you know, sleep here for two or three nights during the workshop.

So we're doing it as a kind of a workshop example of building cordwood masonry.

This is a post and beam style of building.

This will have an earth roof on it, too, and then with cordwood infilling between the posts and beams.

So right here, you can see very clearly, you've got mortar, and you'd put the wooded in here.

Put some insulation in there.

This is just sawdust, which has been treated with lime.

Is there a region you treat it with lime?

Yeah, it retards against insect infestation and rodents and that sort of thing.

Now, to continue this work, you'd put on additional mortar following the hills and valleys of the previous work.

That's a little thin right there.

The students went a little narrow.

They should be full three inches here, and that's not a good example.

Okay.

So you'd use the same three inches if you were building a 16-inch wall?

No.

No, with a 16-inch wall, we'd go about five, six, and five.

Okay.

So there'd be five on each side.

But when you get up to an 18-inch wall, we don't go any broader than that.

Now there's about five, ten, and five.

Okay.

And this is insulation.

And you don't pack it, right?

Well, you can kind of press it in.

Just that with the settling here on, you can press it a little bit.

Sawdust.

Okay.

And that insulates well, I take it?

Oh, yeah.

All right.

Now, you're talking about big,

Look at the size of these logs here.

Now, where would you get an item like this?

I got these from Ronnie Marks at Cedar Knoll Log Homes there, Airport Lumber in Plattsburgh.

And he had a big piece of bombagilia.

It's a type of a cottonwood or a poplar, you know, related to the poplar.

I'll tell you where you'll see them is in Alberg Springs.

As you drive down through Alberg Springs, you'll see bombagilia, big bombagilias, both sides of the road.

And, uh,

That large?

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

They grow big.

That's not as old as you might think.

If you count the annual growth rings, that's just over 100 years old.

Bombagilia has extremely large annual growth rings.

It grows very fast.

Right.

You know, there's one of those I mentioned before at the miner farm, where they have big log,

and they've got all the rings, and they've got little dates out of it, you know, like Columbus and so forth.

You know, that's very interesting when you think about something like that.

Now, is this going to have more on top?

Are you going to enclose it?

I have the windows for those two sections.

All right.

There's windows that go in these two sections.

And there's a,

This beam will continue.

There's a beam that goes across here to finish the top of this panel.

And then we're not quite sure yet what we're going to fill in these panels.

It may be additional cordwood.

It may be bottle ends.

You see, you can make,

You can take a couple of bottles like this.

Take a piece of aluminum cylinder.

This is just printing plate from the Press Republican, for example.

And you take a,

Here's a blue bottle.

Presses into a jar like this.

You make a little spring-loaded bottle end, and that gets laid up right in the wall.

See how this one is?

Right.

You lay that up like a log in.

Yep.

You get,

It's not good because of the overhang there right now, but when the sun hits that wall,

you'll see in the house, you get a tremendously bright light that comes through there.

You talked about the Press Republican printing plate.

It's already been,

This is a used one.

You didn't go buy new ones.

It's printed on the inside, I saw it.

Oh, yeah.

It's printed.

Okay.

What do you advocate in this kind of climate?

You don't build many 10-inch homes like this, do you?

No, 16 inches.

16 inches, you know.

All right.

Up in Canada, they build them two feet thick sometimes.

Wow.

24-inch walls.

Yes.

You see over here this tree,

Now, he's either making a shelf or he's taking his trees a little bit at a time to get some

of his logs.

It's been cut off here.

Was that dead?

Yeah.

Those were all dead, and I was afraid of them falling on this building later on.

Okay.

In fact, it's amazing how much firewood those three stalks,

In fact, it's changing 누구 1993 when it's burned.

Heiles of Israel will hit many leaves in the 22 stories of the Plauze.

ification planet.

That whole pile down there is just a few of those three stocks of wood. That's a big trait.

Alright, well, it's just amazing that the floor here, of course, there's no wood on the floor.

It's slate. It's roofing slates that have been pressed into the fresh concrete.

You pour your concrete, you put Acryl 60 bonding agent on the underside of the slates,

then you press your slates right down into the concrete before it sets.

Then, the last thing you do, you might have to wait a couple hours, you come on with a pointing knife.

I saw a pointing knife here just a second ago. I don't know where it is, but it's just a knife with a little bend on it.

Here's some pointing knives.

After you've got your slates, then you point between them with your knife like this, up to the slates, and you get a beautiful floor.

It looks dirty right now because it's got a lot of this dusty, masonry material on it.

But when you wash the floor and then put a slate sealer on here, you'd be amazed at the color that's in those slates.

There's blues and greens and grays and blacks that come alive.

So you'll only have your classes here in the summer and spring and fall?

You don't have winter classes?

May, July, and September.

Okay.

We just had our last one on Labor Day weekend, and then I do them around the country, too.

Okay.

Next year, I'll be in Alaska, Washington State, British Columbia.

This year, I was in Wisconsin, North Carolina, Kentucky.

And why would persons, if they were going to see your books later, we'll save that till later.

I was going to ask where you get your books, but we'll do.

Oh, you've got a garage out there, too.

That's another dome.

Another dome over there with your garage, yeah.

Um, we saw domes like that, if you remember, when we were talking with, uh, Peter Allen, uh, just down the road here, with Father Makasa.

And, uh, his father-in-law makes those, right?

You said?

That's correct.

George Barber.

George Barber.

Okay.

And you see right here, look at, you've got your table top right here, part of the forest.

Thanks for watching Hometown Cable.

We're at the home of, uh, Mr. and Mrs. Rob Roy.

It says right there, Earthwood is the name of it.

He also has a building school.

This is a picture of his home.

You've been here.

Hope you're going to stay with us, because we're going to go inside and see how, what keeps

it, makes him smile like that all the time.

I don't know if we're going to meet Mrs. Roy or not.

Yeah, I think so.

We are.

Good.

If you've been with us for the show, you know that Rob Roy admitted way back that he

does make mistakes at times.

He said that.

But over the years, you have learned that a berm like this has to be done in certain ways,

there's more advantages and so forth, and you,

Well, you can build the house below grade, a truly underground house, or you can get almost

the same advantage by building the hill up to the house.

So we tried to take advantage of a five-foot difference in elevation.

You remember the gravel pit I told you about?

So there's a five-foot difference in elevation.

So this was, this is five foot higher than it is down there.

Okay.

So you begin to berm up to the house.

Gee, I think it's something like 500 tons of earth has been put up against the side of

the house here.

From the south side, you don't get the sense of that earth sheltering.

No, you don't.

We're in the northeast now.

Right.

And looking at the north side of the house, there's actually 13 feet of earth up against

the north side of the house.

Right.

Now we did a story with Rich, is it Dick?

Richard.

Okay.

Richard Gay in Champlain.

And he has windows in the back where, you know, where his berm is.

But his mostly run very narrow along the top.

Now you haven't got all the way up because you want the advantage of more light into the

rooms.

Is that the reason you haven't got all the way up to the roof?

It was difficult to work out how to berm your, how to have the earth roof meet with

the earth berm.

When you had this complicated, you had, you had a cylinder, you had 16 sides, you had rafters

sticking out, it was going to be a waterproofing nightmare to make that transition from, you

had to, I felt that it was much simpler to have what we call a free standing earth roof,

independent of the earth berm because of the construction constraints of the 16 sided roof

in the round building.

See, Richard Gay's house, which I designed by the way, the earth roof melds into the east

and west sides as a natural runoff.

But the waterproofing detail is simple.

It's a straight wall going up and then it goes straight onto the roof.

But can you imagine the nightmare it would be to waterproof that detail?

And that's very important, right?

Yeah.

You've got to waterproof it, absolutely.

Okay.

Do you have to come out a certain width?

I mean, you've got to come out far enough.

Well, you want to get, you want to get the house set into a favorable ambient temperature.

Now, even if you get a three foot frost here, at three foot two inches, for example, the earth temperature is going to be about 35 degrees.

Well, you've got 13 feet of earth there.

So when you get down 13 feet down, it's a pretty stable 45, 50 degrees.

Right.

Now, that's not warm enough, though, for your house.

So you have to insulate on the outside of your thermal mass of the house, which is the, in this case, concrete blocks below grade, has the insulation on the exterior so that you can exercise control over the fabric of the building itself.

You don't want the block walls to be part of the earth berm.

Then they're going to conduct cold into the house.

So the insulation between the house and the berm.

Now, I notice under that window, I see a lot of cement.

Does that mean you don't have any wood next to the berm?

Correct.

That's a concrete block below grade and a few inches just above grade.

Now, inside, do you have the imitation wood, so it looks, or is that a solid wall, too?

It's a white surface-bonded block wall, which reflects more light.

Cordwood is light absorbing, whereas you want to have plenty of white walls to reflect light back onto the cordwood walls.

Now, an estimate. How long do you think this house can last?

Well, I like to say, uh, taking care of, you know.

See, I can't figure out what the weak link is here. I don't know what would go first.

The roof has got to be a hundred years or forever, whichever comes first.

Is that right?

Well, what can go wrong with it? I mean, it's, uh, you've protected the substrate from the two things that break down other roofs.

So, I've dug up black plastic after 25 years, and it was just as flexible and crisp as the day it was buried.

Uh-huh.

Here we are in America, think of what we do in the, uh, landfills.

And for years and years, we put all our refuse into black plastic bags and buried it in landfills,

which is going to make the job really easier for the archaeologists a thousand years now.

Yeah, because the stuff's all,

Preserving all our stuff in these black bags.

Black bags, yes. Yeah.

The plastic white are not going to be as,

It doesn't deteriorate as long as the sun doesn't get to it. It's bio-non-degradable.

That's the black.

Well, the black is best for that.

Okay.

Yeah.

All right, and of course, here you are, right here, uh, all cut out.

Anything you'd change as you look back here, if you were to start back here again?

Anything that you would change?

No, my father used to say you had to build two houses to get one right.

I think he was off by one. I had to build three to get one right.

I can't think of, uh,

Don't tell that to the person who built your,bought your first two!

Yeah.

All right. And, Christian, are you changing the book that you're, uh, that you're writing?

Just did that. Um, the two,the Cordwood book was revised two years ago, completely updated,

a lot of new case studies and stuff in it, and I just did the same thing with my old underground book.

So now they're both state-of-the-art, come out in the last, uh,

Because of,you want to save energy, you don't have a basement in this house?

I don't think of it as a basement. Uh, I'm against basements, because they're dark, damp, dingy, cold, you know, spaces.

Low-grade space for high cost.

You should go, actually, the extra mile, put in proper drainage, waterproofing, insulation on the exterior of the basement,

plenty of light and ventilation, and get to what's,what we call a truly earth-sheltered space.

And there's a quantum difference between a basement and an earth-sheltered house.

It's like the difference between a dark, dusty attic and a penthouse apartment.

Ooh! That's a lot of difference.

Yeah, well, it is here, too.

Okay. We're gonna go up on the roof, I think.

Yeah, take up there.

He's offered to invite us on his roof.

I can remember, in the sound of movie, the sound of music, Julie Andrews was in a field, and the wind was blowing,

and I kind of get that feeling, I'm up here, among all this tall grass, Rob.

Bob, just don't go dancing off the edge of the roof here.

I won't do that.

It's 14 feet down.

I see that, huh? Yes.

Now, do you, uh, this is how deep here, for your top?

The earth is about seven inches of topsoil, on top of two inches of crushed stone, the same stuff you see around the chimney here.

Yes. Uh-huh.

And that's your drainage layer.

And that is over six mil black poly, which takes most of the water to the edge of the building.

So the water, like any place you have a projection through the roof, such as this chimney, or if you had a vent stack or something,

you'd want to have good drainage around that, because drainage is always the better part of waterproofing.

Get rid of the water.

So this water, running down the chimney, reaches this two-inch crushed stone drainage layer, which is beneath the earth,

and it gets taken quickly to the edge of the building.

Right.

Underneath the plastic is four inches of dow styrofoam, and then under that is the actual roof surface itself,

the waterproofing membrane, which is the WR Grace bitchathene waterproofing membrane, and that's what keeps the water out of the house.

Okay.

So your insulation is on top of your roof.

Yup.

Yup.

And that's important.

What a great view from here.

The whole layout, you see right in a circle here with trees all around.

You get a nice view of the stone circles.

Now, oh yes.

Yes, you certainly do.

Yup.

Now, these people must eat a lot.

I see an awful lot of picnic tables around here.

Now, unless you just go out there and sit and talk.

That's for our conferences.

That's where you have your conferences.

Yup.

Do you serve food to them too?

We do during the work.

We have a lot of workshops.

You do, huh?

In fact, we did during the conference.

Uh-huh.

Thanks to our good friends George and Betty Barber, actually, served all the food under that dome.

We had 102 people here, Bob, from all over the world.

That's a lot of people. That's got to be,

It was a two-day conference, and it was the best thing that ever happened to Cordwood Mastry.

All the stuff that's come out of that is incredible.

Videos have come out of it.

Did you get videos of it? I hope.

Oh, yeah, we sure did. In fact, there's another video that's going to come out of it.

Very much, yep.

And an awful lot of new information was shared. There was a book of papers that came out of that.

Yeah. When Derek Murden was here with Paul Frederick from Channel 57, I remember,

One of the things I remember was seeing your chimney or your,in the kitchen or in the house.

Yeah.

And is this size all the way down?

No. This is the small bit.

It's bigger than that.

Much bigger. Down,in the second level, it's four feet in diameter.

But on the first level, it's five feet in diameter. This is only three right here.

And you have two because you use one for your wood stove and one for your,

Masonry stove.

Masonry stove.

Masonry stove.

And one for the,yeah.

Cook stove.

And I,well, we'll talk about that inside, but I think there's a reason for that is to,again, to heat your whole house from this,

You can heat the whole house with the masonry stove, yeah.

Okay. Anything else we should see up here?

I don't think so.

You see these other little lawns over here? That's the other buildings?

Yep.

What kind of stoves do you have in those?

Much like we saw in your sauna?

A little,there's a little Quebec heater in that one, a little cast iron,

Uh-huh.

,cast iron stove in that one.

And, um,yeah, you can,you can heat them up, uh, real,real quickly.

Do you ever take,you never take the snow off this in the winter, do you?

Oh, no. It's engineered for the snow.

In fact, you know, snow is free insulation.

Do you know an inch of snow is worth R1?

So, if you,if they put two feet of snow on you here, 24 inches of snow, that's a free R24 insulation that's mana from heaven.

It just falls down.

If it's engineered to hold it.

And, that's,it has to be engineered to hold it, but the earth roof holds the snow better than any other kind of roof.

Yes, you have to engineer it to do it.

We see a pump outside.

I hope you have running water inside.

Yeah, Jackie runs out and gets it.

There you go.

He's been asked that question before.

We have, uh,

We have, uh,

A bicycle pump system, thanks again to my friend George Barber, who develops these, uh, systems.

And it pulls it from that well into the house?

Yeah.

Okay, yeah.

That's twice I've heard the name Jackie. I guess that's your wife's name.

Yep.

Okay.

Do you plant the little roof there?

Yeah, the little one's mostly weeds left now, but it'll,you'll be surprised. It'll be plant itself.

You don't have to go out and plant.

Although, I'd like to put some wildflower seeds.

This one here, it used to be all wildflower seeds, but the, uh,the, uh,rye came up and took over, and, uh,

But the first year that roof was on, we had, like, 20 different varieties of wildflowers on it. Beautiful colors. None of them left now.

From the top when even we were saying Midwest here.

aly many different ones, the forest.

The first was built in real Zealand aressiveland grasspark, which wasasted in the perfect very different.

Yes, never mind.

Nevertheless But the lesson is still built.

In trying to clean our wind way, the 1999 ray and built the structure here.

So we were brought into the little framillas, and the spirit journalists.

Uh,on the Internet of the, uh,

Thank you.

Thank you.