‘I didn’t plan on it being this huge’
Emily Bridges says she had two options to deal with last week’s snow days. Either she could stay inside with her four children and the chaos that brings or head out to the backyard for some peace and quiet—and build an igloo.
She chose the latter.
The igloo idea came to her before late January’s big snow fell, when she remembered a similar design she’d seen somewhere on the internet years back.
With that idea in mind, she headed to her local Sureway before the snow started falling and bought 50 aluminum roasting pans.
After the snow fell and temperatures dropped, she began working. She filled the roasting pans with water and mixed in food coloring and let them freeze. (The bricks were different colors as she built, but the sun shining on them through the week caused the color to face, she said.)
She moved a trampoline from one spot of her backyard to another and used its outline as the structure’s circular pattern.
Then she placed the frozen ice bricks along the outside of the pattern and stuck them together with the mortar—snow and water that formed a slush her children called “igloo glue.”
Oh yeah, her children helped—they weren’t cooped up inside the entire week—and earned a bit of sweat equity in the structure. They helped mix up the igloo glue and haul it to where she needed it. Her kids are Ella, 8, Hayden, 6, Jack, 3, and Maggie, 1.
When the kids weren’t helping, her husband, Cory, who had some days away from the office because of the snow, was inside the house handling the babysitting. (Although the whole family took a break for a few days during the week when the flu bug made its way through the household.)
In all, Bridges estimated that she used about 300 roasting-pan-ice-bricks to build the igloo that stands higher than five feet at its tallest point and has a diameter of about nine feet.
And maybe she wouldn’t have completed the massive (in terms of backyard snow structures) igloo if not for a good-natured comment—maybe with a bit of doubt in his tone—from her father, Kennan Fritz, who came to her Powell Street backyard to take a look early in the construction. From there, it was on—she wasn’t going to quit until it was complete.
After an estimated 20 hours of work, Bridges said she finished the construction at about 10:30 Monday night.
“I hadn’t planned on it being this huge,” she said.
