My Gerg Life – Blog

So, my friends and I built this awesome igloo at the Holleman’s last Saturday.  We used two full size coolers and a bunch of small garbage cans to build it.

We started by making a base composed of the cooler sized blocks that were placed in a circular shape with a cutout for the igloo door.  We continued to use the cooler sized blocks for three more layers (4 layers of cooler sized blocks in all).  Then, we proceeded to use the smaller, V-shaped garbage cans to bring the igloo in to form the dome.  We placed the V-shaped blocks with the small part of the V in the inner part of the igloo.  This allowed the blocks to interlock at an angle allow us to taper the blocks in each layer to close the top.  We had people on each end of the layer of V-blocks hold the end blocks while the other blocks were put into place.  When a row was finished, we packed in the end blocks tightly.

When we started building, I was a little skeptical we could finish because the snow wasn’t as packy as I had hoped.  We mitigated this by letting some of the blocks sit out to harden, spraying the blocks with water from a small spray bottle, and having diligent snow patchers to fill in the gaps.

Here are some pics from our awesome day!

The whole project went smoothly and was a lot of fun!  We started at around 11am and finished just before dark at 6pm.  Overall, it took thirty man-hours to build.

Lessons Learned

• We should have built the igloo completely around and then dug the door out.  It would have been much easier to put the dome on using this method; there would be no messing with the edge blocks.
• Four layers, starting with the base, of the cooler-sized blocks were about right for the foundation.
• We had to let the garbage can sized blocks sit out about twenty minutes to harden before using them.
• We had two teams: block builders and patchers.  The patchers filled in the gaps and anchored the blocks in with snow while the block builders when at made snow blocks.
• We used a spray bottle of water to help make the tops of the blocks sticky to hold the next row and to help seal the block joints.