Veteran's underground home in Maine Homestead is affordable little marvel

Hey Jim, we're rigging them up right now. Don't break until you get to the pond. Here we go. Sixth longest in the world. Go! I grew up in Pennsylvania, and I always loved the woods. I always loved Maine, because my parents would take us every summer. I graduated from high school in Pennsylvania. I was in college, right in the center of Boston, surrounded by everybody. I hated that. I was drafted. I spent a year and a half, almost, in Vietnam. When I got out of Vietnam, I just liked it around here so much, I stayed. I built a house. I remember you used to kick a soccer ball over this tree. Oh yeah? That tree is bigger now. Maybe, but it seemed just as big when I was small. So we built that house in 1976, the same year he was born. You need a new net, Cy. And that's still used by my daughter. How many years do you... In that house, until I moved into this one. Yeah, it must have been like... This one we built in 2006, because I wanted to give some space to the kids. I wanted a house that I could retire in. And this is my perfect place. It does everything for me that I need. You just tucked it in here. Why? Was there a hill here already that you opened up? Yeah, it was sloped like this. And we just carved into it and made a shelf. Well, the idea here is... You know what they do in cathedrals? They have these flying buttresses that hold the church together. Well, we did the same thing here. Because when you put a lot of weight on the roof, you'll see it's a domed roof. It pushes on the outside. And you needed to hold it back. And that's what these piles of rocks do. But inside there is a concrete buttress. And the rocks cover the concrete buttress. And the rocks were free. We have so many rocks here. It's just incredible. You had gone to a conference on underground homes at some point. And I think that may have shared with you some of the ideas about using the geothermal heat, you know, the heat of the ground, to keep it at a moderate temperature. In the winter, it's warm in there all by itself almost. And then in the summer, it's cool in there all by itself. It's just the perfect thing to do. Put it into the ground. As you see, it's circular. It's 32 feet in diameter. We carved into this side hill. Took all the earth out and replaced it with... And this is where you'll find it's really strange. We filled it with snow. Built the 6-foot wall. You can see how the wall's straight to here. And it goes all the way around 6 feet up. And we did that conventionally with forms that we made out of plywood. But then we did the unconventional. We filled it with snow. Because putting forms... Concrete forms are very expensive, right? Well, you can make them, but to make them circular like that is a big deal. So we did it with snow. We figured that the snow... We had plenty of it in the winter. Now, all the snow came off the pond. It was on the ice in the winter. And I had a friend with a bucket loader. He just went out there, scooped it up, turned around, came and dumped it. You know, scoop after scoop until we filled it up. Had to separate the snow from the concrete because you can't let the concrete freeze. So we had sawdust in there and plastic. And then the concrete on the roof took about 30 cubic yards. That was 3 truckloads for the roof. When we went to inspect it, just a few hours after pouring, there was a gap here. So that means that all of this structure was self-supporting very, very early. The dome is a 3-dimensional arch. Arches are the strongest shape. And if you get 3 dimensions, you've got an extra strong shape. Were you sure it would work? Nope. Or was this a trial and error? I never heard of anybody doing it. It was an experiment in a way. Well, it wasn't a complete guess because he's a civil engineer. It was a very calculated guess. Yeah, it was all done on logic. Right. But there's some certain things that happened that I wouldn't want to do again. The snow ended up turning into ice. I was hoping it would melt. It was never going to melt. It's underneath the concrete. It's underneath the sawdust. It's all solid ice now. It was going to stay here forever. We are digging out the snow. And it wasn't working that way. Yeah, it says that's going to take too long. The idea was it would all melt and go away and I'd be left with this. It didn't happen that way. So Dustin and I dug a hole from where the sliding glass door is through the ice and up through the skylight and put a big fan out here in September and melted it out before the next winter started. And this is the snow melting inside, you see. So that was day what? Oh no, this was at the end of the first year. It still took probably a week. Right, it was a natural ice house. Well insulated, you know, with the insulation we put outside. Through another winter it would be really bad. So we did it and it melted. Do you remember when your dad said, I'm going to build an underground dome house? Right, well we had a lively conversation about it because we're all kind of an engineering mindset and so we were thinking how can we make it work and what are the big advantages and thermal advantages. But also the volume of a dome house to the amount of material for its construction is really high. Do you know how much this cost? Dad, you used to say that this was your $30,000 experiment. That's right. That's about what it cost to build, $30,000. A lot of the cost for construction comes from Lieber but he did most of the work himself. Yeah. So everything's rounded so you have to think about that with the furniture? It all had to fit the curve, yeah. So you built this wooden bench? That came after a big ice storm in the middle of the winter bent this tree and I cut it out of the white birch tree. Down there is a piece of a burl. It was seven feet across. The biggest burl I've ever seen. We cut a slice off the outside edge and that's what that is. Down there is the conversation pit. You can seat 12 people down there. Yeah, they've got storage underneath the benches. I hate to think. Could be a dead cat. Where'd all the stones come from? Right around here. Most of them probably right from this hole when we dug into the bank. See what I used for a drying rack? An antler from a moose. We've had them walk up the road just a couple days ago. And I see a hole through here. I was going to put a fan in there to blow some of the heat from the stove out into the back, but there was no need to do that. I found out. Those rocks get warm and it radiates the heat on the other side. Because you can go right around the back here, which we're about to do. Ready to go for a walk? Okay, we've got a little bathroom here. This is for visitors. There's a shower in it too. And this is my office and this is one of those light tubes. You see there's no lights on in here, but it comes through here. That goes up to the surface. Yeah, this is my office, obviously. Do you do in here? Are you an architect? I'm an engineer. I'm a civil engineer. So what do you have? You've designed a bicycle. Yeah, we have a zipline. That's something that hasn't been built yet. Here's the back side of that rock wall that you saw from the other side. And this is what gets warm from the stove. So it gets warm from the stove and stays warm and retains the heat. Yeah, the concrete and the rocks hold the heat a long time. And you can see there there they are again. And I put a little window in so you can see out. A little distorted. Gets a little bit of light in here. It keeps going around. This is the laundry room. And here's another one of those light tubes. This is the master bathroom. And I'm the master. And this is the bedroom. Oh, yeah. It's nice to have a window in here. Oh, yeah. And that's where the sun sets over that way. And this is a, looks like a trapeze. Well, it's used for me to get up in the morning when my legs aren't working too well. This is my chin-up bar, which I can't do a chin-up now. It's rugged. He comes out and stretches on it. I hang from it, but I can't do a pull-up anymore. I used to do pull-ups all the time. Used to be a pole vaulter. And then you just built in shelving along the wall. That's right. Just so it fit nicely. Again, had to be done in a curve. These are my two grandkids. At the lake that you built? Right out here on the diving board that I built. The captions should say Maine, the way life should be. And then you're back to the beginning. So it just wraps around this core. Yeah. Very convenient. Those kids that were jumping in the picture there, when they were smaller, they used to have running races around here. And he would time them. He's got a stopwatch. He says, okay, go. And they'd run around in circles. And it's fine to walk on the roof. It's fine. I recently cut down some trees because trees that grow on the roof send their roots down in and they can destroy the insulation. There's a lot of things to consider when the entire environment is just trying to grow. If you want a field here, you have to defend it. It's pretty wild how fast things do build up. This is amazingly tall. His chimney is there. Even though it sticks up several feet from the ground, it's still buried. And watch your step. There's a pipe going that way. So from above, there's very little exposed. It's kind of an amazing spot. And you see how it goes straight back. So this really is just underground. That's right. Yeah. I cleared some trees recently because we planted some fruit trees. So we should have some apples and there's some pears and some other things. And the house ends where? See that white tube there? That's one of the vents. And maybe another meter and a half past there is where the house ends. Okay. So some of that's accounted for. That dirt is kind of supportive? Yes. Well, it supports the rear wall for sure. It does. Yeah. Like those buttresses that you saw in the front, those are used to support that front wall so it doesn't fall out. But here, with all the earth supporting it, it's not going anywhere. Yeah. Right. We can see the... Well, you don't see much down there. Yeah. And here, you didn't plant anything. It just all looks natural, right? Yeah. I don't think we even put any grass seed down it. It just naturally disperses itself everywhere. Yeah. So... But you do see how this would be a natural place to put an underground home because it drops really steeply here. Yeah. The natural land is right there under those blackberries which grow everywhere amazingly. Yeah. And it just... Yeah. He was right. Like this is kind of like a tiny peninsula of land sort of, like a little bench. Yeah. And so he dug into it a bit but made use of, you know, a lot of really good material. And then you see it drops just right down here. That's right. Yeah. And so the white tube is... It's a vent. For venting... The sewer system. These are solar tubes? Is that what they're called? Yeah. They're just for solar gain and they have really shiny linings to the pipes. So the light comes in and it just sort of bounces down through and then eventually it lights up the room. And without it it would be so much darker. Oh, one thing that's funny. This light tube over here was knocked off one winter when my sister was living in here and she looked up and there was a claw and a bear was the one that had knocked it off and was reaching down and couldn't get very far but it was just exploring a bit. It just feels like part of the hill. It doesn't feel like you're on a house, right? And here's the oculus. This is the oculus which I should probably come up and maybe just clean a little bit but they're really wonderful for underground houses. See, we're underground you'd think it would be a dark place but that oculus there lets a lot of light in. It's like a big eyeball. Could be the eye of God is looking through there. Had you seen or read Lord of the Ring or The Hobbit? Oh yeah, I've read them all. So was that an influence? No, it just happened that this is the right shape and J.R. Tolkien had it right too. You wouldn't have any problems with tornadoes. This house is so safe and all the brown is dirt. It's earth. So you took this plan to the city and said, can I get some permits? Well, it's a little town. They relied on me because I was the only engineer in town and in fact, I did serve as the building inspector for the town. So I guess you could say a conflict of interest. So it holds heat a long time. It also holds cold a long time. This is nice and cool in here. But during the winter it might get to minus 20 degrees outside and it's very comfortable in here. It starts a fire but it's nothing significant. That little stove there will heat this place right up. You just don't need much light. No. Wow. We did all this with I make my own electricity and we use wheels like this but bigger. This is called a Pelton turbine wheel, runner. It works on a jet of water. Turns this high speed and the ones that we use the one power in the house is about 14, 15 inches in diameter. The fact that we have a pond up here, high altitude can run the water down a pipeline to a low altitude. The difference creates a lot of pressure. We can make a lot of power. 30 kilowatts. It's running right now. Runs 24 hours a day and powers all the houses here and we sell the excess. And the excess go into the power company. So we are net generator of power. Isn't that nice? So he and his friend designed and built this house. It has metal roofs. So the snow slides off. There's a lot of snow here and ice can build up. It's a challenge. We had one storm that was almost 4 feet high. One storm. That's a lot of snow. Is that the ice house you see way back there? Yes. On the other side of the lake. So we have some friends that are up here and that's their living situation. They live in a bus. There's plenty of land here to have people come. How much land? 600 acres. Originally I only bought 100 acres and that was in 1975. You've really created an entire village here. I don't know what to call it with your own pond. It's a real community. Family village. That's right. That doesn't count the houses I built for other people. I think I've got about 15 or 20 under my belt. Really? Of different houses that I designed and built. And you're not an architect? Well, I play architect. But I'm an engineer. Engineers and architects, you know, they kind of overlap. I built this house in 1976. This is beautiful. This is big. My sister lives here now. There's Anna. Hi. Is this your house then? It is the house I get to live in, yes. So this is like a family compound out here. You're all out here. Oh yeah. And it works. My other daughter lives up on the hill at the other end of the zip line. What was your idea for the house? It's just unique. Oh yeah, it's a castle all right. It is, right? I guess I designed it in my mind first for a while and then I put it to paper. I just have a... I think I know how to do it. I just know how to do it for some reason. I built tree forts and little cabins and stuff when I was a kid. This is just a bigger cabin. It's a much bigger cabin. Hello. Wow, that's cool. And Jesse built that oven there on stilts, you see? It's pretty special. So this gets a lot of use. The core of the house was made first and then what's here was made in the 80s. And because he's kind of a compulsive builder he kept adding to it. And then I said, well, maybe I want a tower. It wasn't part of the original plan. So I reinforced things and then built the tower up there and it's been a great place to be a kid. It's organic. Not necessarily a cohesive design but the style matches. Same designer the whole time. Is this the dam? You're on it. What did it take to build a dam? A lot of truckloads of material and a lot of concrete also. There's a concrete core wall down here that's buried now in the earth. And if you can see over here, you can see how high it is. This is the spillway. In the spring, it's just roaring with water. This is only controlling the water flow. It goes into a pipeline which you might be able to see through the trees down there but that goes down the road quite a long way. You can probably see it from over here. It loses about 400 vertical feet so there's a lot of pressure there. That's where the energy is generated. When we first ran this generator here we weren't making any power until we turned it over. You scavenged a generator from an old submarine. So when you came, this was just a creek? It was a creek that meandered up through a marsh and it was pretty big trees on it too. It wasn't just a marsh. It was a little forest. We cut all the trees and we tied them to the bottom. We watched that thing fill up overnight. When the water came up we were submerged. 14 acres. One thing about my father is that he is a compulsive builder. That is very much what makes his life worth living, is being able to build. On the left we have our sugar shack if you want to call it where we make maple syrup. So we make several gallons of maple syrup every year. Up on the hill is a really big greenhouse that my dad and my sister made together. It's very productive all year. That's another garden right there? That's another big garden set there. These are the gardens that we managed when I was a kid. We ate a lot of food in this garden, that's for sure. The gardens are what fed us when we were kids. Your parents were really frugal or they had to be? We didn't start with much. We had the land and my parents counted things down to the penny to make it work. They moved up with almost nothing. They bought the land and had to count every penny while they were here. They didn't have a vehicle that could come up in the winter. So for the first couple years, with two kids they hiked the road every single day, up and down. During the winter there's no other way to do it. Hey Dad. My father and mother built all of the infrastructure. They've built all of the roads and they built bridges. Everything was designed and built by them. My dad has always had a love of bridges. He loves arches because they're one of the strongest structures that you can possibly build with the least amount of material. Here's Jim's driving the first vehicle over the bridge. Yeah, it's pretty amazing that my father had the interest and experience and capability and vision to build all of this when it started from such a humble beginning. You see, if you look across the pond right now, you can see the wire. That's the zip line. It goes way up on top of that mountain over there. He's constantly pushed the envelope, done things that other people said, ah, that's not going to work. He does the math, makes sure that it's safe and possible and he does it. And you have these boulders, kind of counterweight. They keep the tension on the cable. See, I can wiggle this rock just to show you that it's free to fall but it won't fall because it's held up by the cables. It's almost like megalithic. Yes, that's right. Caveman style. All of this is very much strong enough for you to walk on and the railings are good. It does wiggle a little bit but you're safe. Do you have anything to hit the cable with, Dustin? Uh, yeah. Hit it with something. You're not going to see much, but if you catch the audio of that. It takes five seconds. Now wait and listen. It'll wiggle right about there. So that's a reflection from the top. It reflects off the top and comes down again. Yeah. It really does go all the way up the hill. It's a really fun ride. Dustin holds the record for the fastest run. We timed him and did it in a minute and one second from the top to the bottom. Dustin, I estimated he did a speed run once and I bet he was doing 75 miles an hour. Maybe 80. Flying like Superman. That is fast. It's pretty steep up there. And I'm down here at the bottom going to catch him. But we have a rope. You see the rope over the cable? There's a rope back there that'll stretch and stop them. And I was ready to try to stop him but the rope worked. Thank goodness. Thomas beat me? This is a cool state. There's a lot that can be done here. Sometimes employment's a challenge. In our area, employment's not the challenge. Housing is a challenge. So just trying to build a community where people can afford to live is part of the challenge. We have a cabin out here. My daughter rents it out. This cabin was on the property when I bought it and it wasn't here though. It was up in the woods about a half a mile away. I moved it here. It was made in the end of the 1800s, 1895 or something like that. This thing was kind of settling into the earth. The lower logs were decomposing. The doorway was literally this tall. You had to stoop to get in. So he lifted it up. He prepared some new logs and has made it into a full height. Very enjoyable space. Did you move it log by log? Nope. Put it on two trailers and pulled with two pickup trucks. I thought it was just one. Maybe it was just one, but we had two trailers. Cabin in the woods. Not only is it great during the summer, but if you are prepared to keep the wood stove going, even though it's not really insulated, it's a fun place to stay in the middle of the winter. The little stove heats it up nicely. It's the right stove for this place. Just big enough to make it nice and warm in here. It's got running water. It's connected to our water system so it's got running water and all that. So authentic. Bare bones. Yep, very simple. The floor is just majestic. Those rocks came out of the stream. Nice big flat rocks. I think that one was chosen because it's roughly the shape of the state of Maine. You can see New Hampshire near it too. New Hampshire and Vermont. Connecticut. Rhode Island. I can say it all. So my dad started this project a couple years ago. It's not finished yet, but he's relying on the rest of us to work on it now. It's slightly off-kilter, but that's just because I still need to balance the cables, but it is very very strong. So this one is the third of this bridge that he's built. This one is about 550 feet long. And this will go to where? Where does it reach? So it ties into a trail system. I see. It's not finished. It's not finished. You can see the gaps up there, but you can see we're in the trees now. And with a little bit of effort, we'll get it stabilized and there will be some diagonals that make it so that it doesn't swing quite as much. So we have maybe two or three more days of work on this thing and then it'll be done. And how do you know about the engineering for this? It's mathematics. The cables themselves are well known, and so we calculate the strength of the cable that we need, given the span and the shape of it. It really is mathematics. Beautiful trail. Watch out there into the woods, you know, into the trees, right? Yeah, it's fun to actually walk all the way to the end. And you get there and it's kind of like, well, there's the end. So, yeah. It's a neat design. You know, this is one of the oldest bridge designs there is. Vine bridges, rope bridges. This is only possible using modern materials. Just the fact that we've got these very strong galvanized steel cables, their breaking strength is maybe 50,000 pounds per cable. A single cable would support this, but we use multiple for stability and for backup. So it's overbuilt, by far. So this is a big slab of concrete. It's not just a slab, it's deep also. Provides a very strong anchoring point for one end. And the other end is this enormous stone that's about the same size. I'm going to show them the little treehouse here. That's the treehouse. Everything's still solid, which is really nice. She's going to do it. You're at your own risk now. It's quite modern looking. It's a big helix, like a DNA molecule. And up there was the starting point of a small zipline that went across the water. It seems solid. There's a door that's open, which was the way you would exit if you were hanging on to the zipline, but that's gone now. There's no hope of jumping and reaching the water. Now there might be some beehives up there, be careful! Okay, I'm coming down. My father inspires a lot of people to learn how to do things that previously they just took for granted were out of their range. This is the illusion of control tower, as I like to call it. It's a collaboration between my dad and I. It's 98 feet tall. There will be a house where the roof is at the transition point between green and grey. That means the roof will be at about 68 feet off the ground. There'll be a spiral staircase to get into it. All the surfaces are already installed in the pipeline, and there's die wires coming off the sides to add stability. Three die wires on this side. One will provide kind of a dumbwaiter so that will be the way to get heavy objects up into the house. And the fourth one will go across the canyon. It will be a zipline as a second means of getting away from the tower. It'll be about 450 square feet with windows all the way around. Yeah, flanges are welded on and the various sections of used and abused pipe have been made into one mostly straight piece. This one's about 68 feet long. And it started with what? What is this? Just an old... This is reclaimed pipe from a paper mill that's in New Hampshire. Dustin's sky needle is going up! I want to reuse materials as much as I possibly can. You don't stop. No, we don't stop. We don't stop. I work in information technology and it's so intangible. Having something that you can touch and share the physical experience with other people means a lot. Life is worth living I guess. And it's fun. We're doing it. It's fun building. It is. It is a lot of fun. That transition between imagination and the real is where I think a lot of my joy is. You've done a lot around here, Dad. It's worth showing off. I guess. Amazing. I think I'm going to get a yogurt comes to mind. I've got some yogurt. Do you want a yogurt?