How the Hell Do You Cover a Geodesic Dome?

We built our geodesic dome about a year ago and I’ve been meaning to cover the darn thing. I’ve done a bunch of research and come up with just about nothing that I actually liked or thought looked good.

On one of the farms we worked at during our year on the road we were actually tasked with covering the north side of his dome greenhouse with plywood, pretty much an impossible task but we did it and got room and board for our efforts. ( :

Here are some pictures of that:

He raised sheep so insulated the walls with sheep’s wool and whatever he could find. Really cool!

And this is what he heated the greenhouse with! Talk about cool!

More filling in the walls! AH! What crazy work!

But our dome is much smaller. His was made of 2x4s and ours of conduit. The conduit is not condusive to some of the covering options that his was. Ours will have to be different.

We first covered it in clear plastic with duct tape in whatever fashion we could. Not gorgeous but it keeps the rain out and we can store some tools until our post and beam structure gets built…

Ultimitley I want it to look nicer and for the neighbors not to be able to see in. Because the neighbors on that side of the yard are mean and call the po-po on us if they see any activities they don’t like… I’ve got some new ideas on how to block their view into our yard coming soon.

You can see in the above picture that I was able to find this super awesome white sort of tyvex-like material to cover the outside with. The question now is how… I’ve been practicing on a bowl.

Rob wants to do something like this:

Strips layed over it and attached under the edges.

My theory is large shingles with a round piece at the very top:

We have yet to come to a consensus in order to move forward.

I’d love to hear your opinions or suggestions if you’ve got any idea how to do this in a way that will look decent.

Thanks for reading and any advice.