It all started with an idea.

I'm going to go back in time to about 10 years ago. We attended Education Week at Brigham Young University with our best friends, John and Lorraine Thiele, and while we were there, we felt we needed to move out of our current house and into something that would protect us from as many possible disasters as we could think of. We were concerned about floods, tornadoes, lightning, power outages, termites, and looters. A pretty tall order, but we set out doing research. I found a lot of information on the web and started putting my ideas together. We realized an underground, or earth bermed, concrete house would probably take care of all of our issues, so I concentrated on that. I was also hoping to be able to do a lot of the work myself to try and save money.

We narrowed our search to 3 builders, each with a different style of concrete home. We first saw Davis Caves. They build home that look pretty much like regular houses on the inside, except that in order to hold up their flat concrete roofs, you need a support pole every 8 feet. This seemed to limit our layout options too much, and they felt a little cramped, so we went to the next option. Monolithic Domes are round structures with dome ceilings that feel very roomy, but adapting to round walls is not very practical. It was also not designed for being completely buried, so we rejected that also. Finally we checked out Terra-Dome. It seemed to be the perfect combination of square walls and a domed roof. Check out their website for more details (terra-dome.com).

Next came the layout. We struggled with this for more than 2 years. Terra-Dome (TD) homes have 2 basic options, with endless possible combinations; a 24 x 24 module, or a 28 x 28 module. you can put as many of these together as you want, in just about any configuration. We finally submitted the plans below to TD for a quote and we thought we were on our way.
While we were working on the plans we looked for a place to build. Let's just say providence smiled on us and we were able to buy 5.6 acres with a nice hill to build into at auction for just $18,500. These pictures were taken just after the driveway was put in.

Having a solid plan, we went ahead and had the excavation work done to prep the site. Here is how that looked.

That's enough for now. I will add more about the building process next time.