The end of one season turned into the beginning of another, and the end of the next, before we could get back to work on The Hobbity domes of The Pebbles.
By that stage ‘The Amazing Sustainable Building Project’ had truly become ‘The Awful Thing In The Corner’ hidden from view behind a slowly deteriorating timber fence.
Our hasty retreat the previous spring had left the polypropylene earth bags exposed to the sun and allowed the UV light to degrade them terribly.
The hessian earth bags we had interspersed in the walls, to increase the amount of key for subsequent covering layers, had in some cases started to rot and, in others, wasted away completely.
When we had stopped that Friday afternoon we had left with about a ton of concrete still to pour over the roof of what was to become Bambam, the tiniest of the domes. In the meantime, without sufficient cover, the supporting posts had burst through the roof from below in a several places. It was as if they had been shelled by concrete piercing shells from above.
Inside, the story was worse. The porous and leaking concrete roofs had allowed water to seep into the bags of earth, which were now soaking wet or had burst open, spilling their contents onto the floor. The insulating layer of concrete had degraded away and fallen from the roof, leaving the steel formwork sagging and bulging in mid-air.
In some places the walls were so bad they had disintegrated completely, leaving the concrete shells sticking out at weird angles with no support.
But the worst was yet to come, inside the domes themselves. The straw bale walls, which were now soaked through, had slowly rotted away producing a foul smelling brown slurry. It oozed across the floor and filled the air with the unmistakable stench damp and decay. And as the support of the straw bales diminished, the two or three tons of concrete in each roof had begun to head south, bearing down on the tiny steel pins that had never been designed to support them.
All of the domes were suddenly a foot shorter than they had been when we last went in them – and with Bambam you could barely get inside, so low had she sunk.
We reluctantly admitted defeat and decided it was time to end the experiment. Demolition was the only sensible option and we invited Ken the builder over so we could find a slot in the diary for him to come and bosh it all into a hole in the ground.
But to my surprise Ken, who had never refused to do anything before, did just that.
‘No.’ he said ‘I don’t think so. I reckon there’s not that much wrong y’ear we can’t put right!’
And with that began a whole ‘nother chapter of pain.
Yet more sweat, yet more tears and yes, of course, yet more blood!