Murdock ? With the hot summer sun beating down on her new dome-shaped home, Karen Sowers dubbed it her “Kansas Igloo.”

The saga of how the house rolled into shape is a four-year tale that started with an Internet idea.

Sowers and her husband, Dennis, then living in Bison, had planned on building a house when he spotted a dome as he surfed the Net.

Living in a geodesic-shaped structure with no corners held a kind of mystic appeal. They decided they’d construct it themselves on weekends, commuting to the building site in eastern Kingman County.

Never mind that both of them worked full time, he as an over-the-road trucker and she as a nurse – and that neither of them knew anything about carpentry or plumbing.

Framing in windows, cutting and hammering a stairway or running waterlines to a kitchen sink were jobs they’d never done before.

Having just moved in, the building progress is indelibly imprinted in Sowers’ memory.

The floor plan was a hand-drawn circle on a piece of paper, with a ground-level living room, the kitchen and main bathroom on an elevated platform and the balcony bedroom up a flight of stairs.

They started buying supplies in October 2001. On Christmas Day, they downed their holiday meal in 30 minutes and headed for the building site – where they dug the holes for footing and set the forms that would hold the support posts.

They ordered a pre-cut dome shell and began working inside. By spring, they were ready to install the living room bay windows.

In summer 2002, they built the platform to hold the kitchen and bathroom. That fall, they added the back door, and by winter, they framed the upstairs bedroom.

They worked on the staircase leading to the upstairs bedroom throughout the winter of 2002 and spring of 2003. In October 2003, when her husband headed overseas on a trucking job in Iraq, Sowers decided her building days were over.

She hired a contractor to finish the inside and a roofer for the outside.

Sowers is anxious for her husband to come home from Iraq on leave and see the house completed.

“If we can do round, anybody can do square,” she said. “For four years, this has been our life.”