Eco-Roofing!

On March 24th, we volunteered to help build a "green" eco-roof through a really cool friend of Dan's (Katie) that he met at this weekly lecture series about affordable green housing.

We arrived at the house (which, incidentally, was one of the houses we toured on our "Green Homes Tour") (see previous blog entry), and had orientation (rules of the project below) ...









A nice poster board describing the elements of green roofing:









...then we got to try our hand at each of the jobs in the process of creating the roof.

The process includes:
1. shoveling the substrate (dirt) into buckets (note our dirt pile below)









2. hauling the buckets up the stairs to the front of the house (the Bucket Brigade!)

3. clipping the buckets to caribeaners attached to ropes (hard hat zone below)









4. hauling the buckets up to the roof (Dan, Jessica, and Bevin)









5. sorting the buckets into extensive and intensive substrate










6. handing off the buckets to the people harnessed in on the sloped part of the roof (no, not us, we were not covered by the homeowners insurance. maybe next time!)


















7. planting the seedums (which involves a little flick of the wrist and a lot of finesse)













The March 24th Volunteer group:









We had so much fun the first time that we went back today (April 8th) to help put the finishing touches and haul up the last few buckets of substrate.

Altogether a very cool experience--I learned a lot, and I think Dan got a chance to do some things hands on that he had only read about in books before.

And, as always, Dan's favorite part of the experience was the port-o-potty on site.