Good Morning!! I finally found a moment to sit down and take some time to write the next episode after the Chapter 1 : When trying to start a new life can be more painful than a birth...
Instant of Truth!!!
Is the dome going to stand up or fall apart like a giant Jenga game??!! Are the triangles going to fit nicely together? or am I going to be stuck in an impossible Tetris for days and days...?
SOOO scary moment was this one. I thought, "That's it. No money left. I can't make mistakes. All depends now on those calculations, abstracts number taken somewhere on internet... Who knows how accurate they are? Who have tried them?" No clue... If it becomes a mess, I'm not sure I am capable to adjust it, find solutions and tricks.. I'm not a carpenter at all!!
Luckily, my boyfriend was here. He might have magical solutions if everything goes wrong!?? This should have reassured me.... but it didn't. My fear to end with a useless wobbly stack of wood (and without a home) was so enormous, nothing could relax me. Building the cupola was a stressful moment for me, and for sure, for my gorgeous lover who had to share it with me, too. Upss... Sorry.
And I just found a picture that makes me laugh everytime. That's the way we carried the triangles 2 at a time, tight to our back :
It felt like having a kite ready to base jump from the edge of the mountain!!
And here we are now, starting to put the Cupola together with the relief of a cooling down evening... Just to remind you, that was July in Andalucia...
First ring, Easy (apart that I didn't have the scheme with me that day, so we put them in the wrong sense... little detail 😊, but I was sure it was right... yeahh)
Next day we did it again from the beginning, with the full-on heat this time. The second ring was still a little bit flexible, so we could join the triangles one by one without too much difficulty...
The third one started to lock the cupola, everything became tighter, and it was no much room left to manoeuvre. When few pieces didn't match well, it became harder to correct their position. From now, even if sometimes we started to get some shade from the raising walls, we also began to enclose the heat inside the dome.
Each triangles side measured more than a meter, so meanwhile my partner held one side of the triangle, I held the other. When we thought the piece was in its right place, one would try to put some clamps to help us and the other will have the screw-driver ready to fix all together. I remember many times, from the top of the ladder, to hold a triangle in a sort of balance with my forehead till I could grab the clamps and put them in place. The heat and the exhaustion was so heavy, drops of sweat were running along our faces non-stop.
We started the fourth ring, and I was impressed by the precision of the fitting. I could see that it might not be perfect but it was Very Well I could say. And it felt so strong already!
Our legs was tired, going up and down the ladders every few minutes and holding difficult positions up there (the next day my legs was covered with bruises). We was litteraly melting with the heat, but seeing the end coming soon...
The last ring : 5 triangles to fit! Everything was fine... till the last one!
I believe we spent 1h30 only to fit the last piece. It just wouldn't make it, the hole was smaller than the triangle. All the tiny and invisible positioning errors from the previous triangles would have built up in one pretty big difference at the last piece!
And we couldn't put this one from inside. This only piece had to be fitted from outside (so, my partner climbed the dome : proof the cupola was very strong already to take the weight without moving!), and I was inside trying to get the piece in place and holding it in the case the triangle would pass through. But in reallity, it was so not accurate, that we had to go down tens of times to cut few millimeters of the triangle's side to make it finally fit!