More stories about Backfill

• Quake-Proof Cottage - Steel SIPs Add Strength

  Quake-proof cottage

• Big Stairs Made From A Douglas Fir Trunk

  Big stairs

• Re-roofing a Church Dome with Cedar Shingles

  Reshingling an Indiana landmark designed by Philip Johnson.

• The Music of the Spheres

  Spherical buildings present some obvious practical challenges. But because a sphere provides the largest possible interior volume per unit of surface area, the form has long fascinated designers and architects, and quite a few reasonably successful spherical structures have actually been built. 

• Heavy Equipment Simulators

  Until about five years ago, the only way to practice operating an excavator or bulldozer was to climb aboard and start moving dirt, ideally in an area without too many buried power lines and gas mains.

• Using Shrink-Wrap To Keep Out Rain When Roof Is Under Construction

  Keeping dry with shrink wrap

• Simple Math for a Slow Economy

  Earlier this year, timber-framer Paul Freeman, owner of Brooks Post & Beam in Lyndeborough, N.H., realized he had a problem.

• Gift From the Sea

  A remodeler encountering a layer of Cabot's Quilt inside an old building might mistake it for the tattered remnants of a Hawaiian grass skirt -- hastily stuffed into a wall, perhaps, during a police raid of some Prohibition-era costume party.

• Extreme Rammed Earth

  Rammed-earth walls used to be elementary.

• Reflections on Reconstructing an Old Barn

  The materials for this project arrived on the job the usual way — via truck delivery — but that was pretty much where any resemblance to a normal job ended.