Bought rocky lot, created megalith home amid boulders

i definitely enjoy working with rocks i mean that's what nature gave us so that's what we work with here this we call it the cave when my kids were little they used to crawl in to make a fort there really wasn't any room to stand up but the kids thought it was a pretty cool spot in there you know there were some skeletons and there were bats and so forth once they outgrew that and it was my turn to play i was able to come in here with the equipment that i had break the rocks that i needed and make more room inside this is the area that my kids used to play in right here and then once they stopped playing in it i got to come in here start digging digging digging digging this boulder is there it's like it's not suspended but it's pride or wedge between this rock and that rock you know so if one of these rocks goes away this thing will go right down here so it's a you know it's a cave but there's a lot of light ventilation we only built the the little uh shed roofs up there to keep the snow from piling up in here you can see all the rocks had to get drilled then they often had to get drilled again to where they could get to a size where i could pull them out either with my my mini skirts here or i'd chain them up and use the pulling strength of my excavator from outside the way the cave developed was i didn't know if i would make a little cabin back here it ended up being too small for that and that's why i ended up building this hot tub and then every one of those rocks that you see is a real rock set by hand so how much of this half did you have to dig out the earth was probably at about this height somewhere in here and it wasn't just dirt it was mostly rock so we didn't just dig it out first we had to break it up and then dig it out how long did that take it took almost a year yeah and then uh one of the most frustrating ones was after we built the tub we decided to keep going to see what else we could do this rock has drill marks everywhere because this rock was pressed up against this boulder here so even though i could drill it and break it the rock just had nowhere to go but i couldn't get from there to behind me until i got rid of this rock i bet i probably spent the better part of a month working on just this one rock it finally gave up this rock extended across so you see it's multi-level drilling so you can only drill so far so you drill like 12 to 18 inches you try to break off a big chunk and so you'll see like three different levels of drilling to finally get enough of it to fall off that we could get through here come on in we built the cave hot tub area and then we started to explore how much further we could go this rock extended all the way across you see the color difference in here because this rock actually touched that rock so all of this had to come out so this is an area we call it the cave my kids used to use this rock as a climbing rock you can still see an eye bolt in the wall that was set back when my kids were little they would hang their ropes and try to learn how to do their climbing we got this out of the way so we could come in here and we were able to get our excavator in here from the outside and kind of pull stuff away and it kind of sort of revealed itself as we kept going and going i hadn't planned on building a cabin this big but once we kind of had stuff pulled out of the way it's like oh we should probably build it this big we wanted to have a kitchen we wanted to have a full service unit you know from a a restaurant style refrigerator okay yeah but no freezer okay do you have runny water oh yeah yeah we've got a we dug a well the countertops all had to be custom done because we weren't building anything that was square or flat so i just used regular old two by sixes and then i ran a router down the seams of them and backfilled that with a grout and then sanded it and then put a two-part epoxy on it so it will you know last forever i added a planter to have some greenery in here honestly it hasn't worked very well yet we we do have some grow lights we'll figure it out because the planter is deep enough it's it's about this deep and it's irrigated so it should work so that basically is one big boulder behind you yeah well this boulder is also the boulder that you see inside the hot tub area it's also the boulder you see from outside as you're going into the cave so i have a little saying it's that you know nature makes it perfect i just like to come in and personalize it we had the property the kids were playing in it the house that we had didn't have a great picnic area so that was an obvious thing to build first when we started there was just kind of a bramble of boulders so we removed the boulders and then bring the earth in to fill it and level it but now it's a pretty nice spot it's a lot easier to dig in florida but this is more fun to dig when it came time to continue the trail and see what else we could do we would run into a rock like this for example and there was no way i could move this but we have a technology where we can drill it and then we don't use dynamite because it's too dangerous here and i'm not licensed but we use something that's referred to as a liquid dynamite it's actually an expanding mortar mix so we'll drill the rock and then we'll mix this slurry put it into the rock and then you come back like a day or two later and the rock will have cracked and the goal is to find the seam in the rock so that it will crack in a way that you can then maneuver it around or get rid of it so this rock would have extended out over here you can see the drill hole here is like 28 inches almost this rock would have continued out like this so there would have been no way to get from there to here unless you got rid of the rock wow that's a big piece of rock to take out yeah we've moved a lot around all with just a backhoe or something oh we can't even get a backhoe up here uh we use the the term for it is a mini skid steer so it's a walk behind it's kind of like a powered wheelbarrow okay oh so this is kind of fun we built an outhouse everybody's familiar with what an outhouse is however my outhouse doesn't drop straight down because of the pit is actually a naturally form pit between the rocks so i needed to run the material off a couple of feet before it could drop not a big deal i diverted some creek water to allow for it to be a flush toilet you know sort of a toilet to look at but the inside is a stainless steel bowl and it's heated okay and then and then it drops down it goes back that way before it drops and yeah it's just problem solution move on to the next thing so this is the rustic stone cabin just kind of had it as a playhouse for the kids in a little getaway for myself and the wife so this area had been kind of excavated with the material being used to make the picnic rock area so when i came back i had this really nice rock face right here and then i had this natural rock that i couldn't do anything with because it was too big but i was able to create a cabin with two sleeping lofts and then kind of a mid-tier sleeping loft we do a lot of drilling and so like the concrete block at either end of the rock will be anchored into the rock by a steel bolt the wood's also drilled into the rock yeah because the reason these rocks are this way is because there were probably glaciers back in the day or well these rocks probably are where they are because they fell from higher up and just landed here we we have rock fall every year maybe two years ago a rock came down landed in the road that was as big as a school bus crushed the road traffic was stopped for two weeks while they came out and drilled it and blasted it and hauled it away how do kids like the hot tub after a couple years my son and i built that as a project and it's wood fired we have a creek that runs through here and we diverted the water so it could fill the hot tub and the tub has what's called a snorkel stove which is a submerged aluminum body stove that uses wood heat to warm the water because we don't have enough electricity up here for a normal hot tub so it's just a little fire box right there the smaller the wood the better the fire the better the fire the sooner the tub gets hot so you can put a lot of wood in there if you wanted to keep it going yeah yep it's a little bit of work but it's pretty cool and then the water after we divert it just goes right back into the creek so it's a natural creek hot tub it fell to get where it is right you know if there was an earthquake maybe but just falling all on its own no that won't happen pretty much yeah it's wedged in pretty tight it looks pretty cool i mean it does from a storybook so we built this trail i built this trail this took a whole summer we bought what was left over from a development done in the 1960s and we're still on our property that interestingly enough included 40 acres of what's called goat dome it's unbuildable it's just pretty to look at but we had no use for it so we gave that to the u.s forest service because you can see that there's a canal that runs there and that irrigates most of the icicle valley well we owned that also we had no use for it we were going to give that to the forest service but the irrigation district got wind of what we were doing and they basically said hey steve why don't you give us the ditch and we'll give you this property on the other side of the road it included our building site that we built our home at on the river so that's what we wanted and this was just like a bonus just worked out really well we weren't trying to make money and we ended up winning do you need to get permits or anything for doing this kind of stuff we get the permits that we feel we can attain so electrical permit well permit we're getting a septic finalized right now with a permit so yeah we permit everything that we feel can be permitted what's this pipe here that's the chimney for the fireplace in the hot tub area the rocks are my architect really they tell me what to do so that rock's perfect but i just had to personalize it by allowing passage around and using it as a wall and a place to hook my roof in my first thought once i came through the doorway was that the cabin would basically end where i'm standing right now and that would just be one story but in order to get to this i had done so much earth work back here that once i got to here i was like well i might as well keep going this way and then the way the rocks presented themselves it was kind of like kind of got to do this as two stories that's what the rocks told me to do so we tried to bring it to fruition so the way the the loft kind of ended up we wanted to have a little bit of privacy but we had this open loft area here and then this natural rock that the kids can play at we even have some climbing holes that we've added for the real climbers out there you know everything's kind of built minimalist so like you know this would be the entire closet the biggest challenge once we decided to go whole hog like this two stories was how to support the roof there wasn't going to be anything square i could make stuff level but i couldn't make stuff square and so we thought of like this spider web made out of steel but to do all of that we had to start with a centerpiece and then we had to figure out a way to stand this column up i was able to drag it in here with my excavator and it was like what do we do with it now because i couldn't lift it we bolted an eye bolt on the very top and then we strung a steel cable from a high rock to the top of this rock and then beyond and then using the excavator we were able to pull pull pull pull until finally the beam swung up and then was just kind of swinging like this until we could inch it over and then drop it down so then we had our center column so we thought that was like you know the biggest challenge well then we have all these h beams and the h beams had to be positioned on the top and then where they belonged out along the rim it was a scooch and prey project you know a couple of inches at a time so that was probably the most dangerous part of the whole project was setting those h beams so the roof ends up being a flat roof we use two by eight tongue and groove for the roof deck on the outside we then have like a rubber membrane for the weatherproofing we have solid foam and then we have another membrane and then we have earth because rock makes it so much cooler so it's so hot outside but it's so nice in here so much of this is underground that we we stay relatively consistent with the earth temperature there's no air conditioning in here if people leave the the windows and doors open right now then the temperature will go up quite a bit the fireplace because nothing's square we wanted to be able to see the fire from pretty much everywhere well i've got people over there i've got people in here i've got people all around and then with the glass in the back at night the fire actually reflects off of the granite rock and so you get a glow all the way around it's really pretty nice there's a bathroom the bathroom is a three-quarter bath so you have a shower but not a tub this is a flush toilet i think i stood in that shower for over a week setting those rocks really because every one of them was set individually pulled from local just from yeah i i go to the creek see dirt dirt don't play there would be entire days where i made no progress but i worked all day is it hard when you sort of are working almost by yourself and you see that there's almost no progress i would get frustrated if a tool broke or if a tool got jammed by a rock but you know if the rock is just being tough on me um that didn't really frustrate me that was like okay you won today but i'm going to win tomorrow come on guys you enjoy it yeah i enjoy working with the rock that's fun well what else am i gonna do i mean i'm i'm a worker bee i'm not a golfer i don't sit at the beach you know i this is what i do you

Channel: Kirsten Dirksen

Views: 1,326,709

Rating: 4.9316196 out of 5

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Id: GSdzhDzAltU

Length: 18min 44sec (1124 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 10 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Opcn]

Not self promotion, just thought some folks here might like it (karma whoring?). Not super relevant to CHB given the different geology and architecture but in the same ballpark.

[u/Basoran]

That's some cool shit. Good maker space.

[u/brainwasch]

This is incredible!! Great work!