Jim and I looked at sooo many areas of Florida. We were at the Panhandle at least a few times, Venice beach was in the running for a while, and we both absolutely fell in love with St. Augustine! If you've never been there you should go, if you've been you know what I'm talking about. So many things to do and to see. The oldest continually inhabited city in the U.S, loaded with history. It's right on the water, great fishing, easy access to Georgia and the Carolinas. Plus A one school districts if you have children.
So if it's so perfect why didn't we buy there? Because our dome on 4 plus acres in St. John's county would have cost us an easy half a million dollars and the taxes would be close to 5 figures. For some I'm sure that's not a lot of money, but it is to us. There are hardly any concrete block homes in glorious St. A, mostly wood frame and the few homes in our price range are on postage stamp sized lots and still have insane taxes. So begrudgingly we decided to look elsewhere. It was after a disastrous and depressing house hunting trip to Palm Coast when Jim typed in Domes for sale in Florida and this one popped up. It was in our price range, had many amenities, acres of woods and in an area that wasn't our first choice but a nice area nonetheless. Plus my sister would be living a few miles away. So it wasn't our first choice but our best choice.
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| Our Dome home |
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| main dome common area |
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| One of the guest bedrooms |
Jim was a hippie in the 60s, well actually I don't think you ever retire from being a hippie, and tried to build his dream dome in upstate New York. He never got the chance to finish it and always wanted closure. This project was completely finished but not exactly the way Jim would have finished it. He complained that it "should" have a cupola with vents to expel cooking fumes and heat. It does have ceiling vents in the 18 foot high center dome but obviously some corners were cut with it's building. Also some of the fixtures are not even remotely considered high end. Yet, the whole driveway which is the size of some city streets is paved and the entire property is fenced! So they spent money on some things and others got left off the list. I certainly don't want to beat the original owners up over details as I know domes are very expensive to build and what we paid for it was probably equal to what he spent assembling it 20 years prior! So I do feel his pain and can certainly overlook a few things that "could be " better.
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| Hippie Jim building his dome |
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| Jim's dome in upstate New York |
Domes were popular in the 60s and every hippie wanted one. Buckminster Fuller the original designer /architect thought everybody should have one. They were supposed to be the perfect home and are very energy efficient. There are two types of domes, monolithic and geodesic, ours is the later. It is composed of triangles linked together in a geometric pattern. Each triangle is concrete over steel mesh and re-bar with 7 inches of Styrofoam for insulation. We actually have 4 domes linked together. The center dome (common area) is 30 ft, and there are three 25 foot domes (master suite, guest bedrooms, and garage) attached to the main dome. Our domes were built with no mode of heating. If it is 25 degrees outside it will be 62 inside. Yeah 62 is still a little chilly but I think that's pretty damn efficient! It does have AC of course, this is Florida after all. And domes are supposed to withstand everything Mother Nature can throw at it, high winds, tornadoes, earthquakes, hurricanes, even sinkholes. There was a well known concrete dome that withstood Hurricane Andrew a Cat5 storm which is sometimes know as the "hand of God". As all his neighbors homes fell into rubble the dome owner simply went outside when it was over and swept off the driveway. Is it an impenetrable fortress of solitude, it's supposed to be but lets face it nothing is infallible and I would never doom it by saying it is. There were problems with Buckminster's dream home. They were very expensive to build, and you had banks looking at it and saying hell no! "If they default on the mortgage we are stuck with a "weird home". So in order to own one a person has to fork out at least half, a price banks are confident you won't walk away from.
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| our woods |
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| first section of driveway |
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| driveway to the fence |
One issue that came up was whether we would be able to care for such a large place with so much land. We are both in our 60s and not in the best of health and these domes require some maintenance. The good news is we will never have to replace the roof. The worse case scenario there is we patch it with concrete and paint with paint sealer. It's the easiest fastest roof-job ever! Every year the domes need to be cleaned, screens need cleaning and thanks to a screen dome in back some of those screen are 15 feet high! In order to paint the domes there are circle hooks built into the tops of them. You are supposed to shimmy up the dome, latch onto the hook and rappel down painting. Okay, I cringe thinking about my 68 year old husband doing that. And he's not one to hire someone to do something "he" can do Even if his wife is inside freaking out!
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| Cleaning the domes |
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| Cleaning the screen dome |
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| Jim on his hand made platform to fix the screens |
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