Screen your materials with progressively finer screens as you go. We ran out of bricks and did not complete the wall. Four or five courses for a structure is good for a day.
Let it dry and it will be ready to continue the next day. The deal with homesteader cabins is that back in the s that the government would give you a five acre parcel if you built a shack with the minimum dimensions of 12 by 16 feet.
So people built tiny shacks to just those dimensions! Kurt teared off some nasty wood paneling in the shack to show how you could retrofit a building with adobe. Here he is starting to fill the space between the interior studs with adobe.
The idea is that the adobe will insulate the walls, providing vital insulation in a harsh desert climate. This may not work as well in more humid places. Here the thick layer of mud will dry fairly quickly. Elsewhere it might encourage mold. Next we nailed some reed fencing material over the adobe-filled studs and started to plaster the wall with the same adobe we used to fill the wall.
The reed fencing gives the adobe something to hold on to. Here again, as with the garden wall, the interior wall would be given three progressively smoother coats. The miracle of all of this is that it is dirt. The insulation is dirt, the bricks are dirt, the mortar is dirt and the plaster coats are dirt. Nothing could be simpler.
What a great day! It would be nice to see more structures made of adobe in that area nowadays. The ceilings in it were embellished with the long branches of ocotillo. For two story construction the first floor needs to be at least inches thick and the second should step back to inches. Adobe walls should not go higher than ten times their thickness so if the wall does not step back for the second floor then it needs to be twenty-inches thick all the way up.
My best recommendation is to stick to a single story if you have not built adobe before and given that you are on a sand base.
We would also love our 'wall' to have some curves. Thanks for any hints on reading material and whether homemade sun baked adobe bricks would support this wall project. A : It will work just fine. Just stay a bit below the height limitation of a 10" or 12" wall. A good foundation to the frost line or else a Frank Lloyd Wright gravel trench with or without the concrete grade beam will work.
Curves in the wall make it stronger. We do have an adobe discussion group at adobe-subscribe AT yahoogroups. A: Tires rammed tightly with soil make a reasonably acceptable foundation. I don't think that it saves time or energy. Q: I am designing an adobe house. Since abode walls have to be protected from rain I was thinking of elevating my house and using rocks up to the plinth height.
Will it be structurally safe as the house elevation will be partially in a artificial pond? A: This sounds like a really interesting project! Actually a stone foundation might be one of the best choices if your house is to be situated in standing water. The reason for this is that because of the spaces between stones, there is little chance that they will transmit moisture upward due to capillary action.
There are plenty of successful buildings around the world sitting on stone foundations. Q: I am wondering though about the capillary action of the concrete foundation. Our house site is in a Very dry area with the water table down around feet or so, so I'm not worried about that. My question: Is the capillary action of concrete such that, during mild to heavy New Mexico snow melt or summer monsoons, enough moisture could wick up into the foundation from the ground to threaten the integrity of the structure, given that the first course of the house is all of unstabilized adobes?
A: It is useful to paint emulsified asphalt on top of the foundation or trowel on one of the roofing asphalt coatings. Since your adobes are already in place, you might coat the exterior surface of the foundation with asphalt or Bituthene or similar sheet material. In the long run, I don't think you have much to worry about. The traditional response to the snow problem was to sweep or shovel it away from the building.
You will do fine. Worst case is that the house might only last years instead of Q: Firstly, my plan is to build a small 10' diameter dome using earth, with an earthbag stem wall filled with pumice on site. A: Over the years, I have worked with pumice in a variety of forms. In ground contact it becomes damp and looses its insulating abilities. In walls, it has higher moisture content than the ambient atmosphere and surrounding materials.
Pumice is well designed to be a fine capillary action medium and any moisture in pumice becomes well disbursed and uniformly damp or dry very quickly. Therefore you will want to introduce a good moisture and vapor barrier between the bag wall and the adobe. I am no fan of the use of bag walls at the lower part of the building.
Filled with pumice and no binder such as clay or cement, the system depends entirely on the polypropylene material. As evidenced by the short lifetime of blue poly tarps found at most construction sites, the material has little resistance to ultraviolet degradation.
Therefore, you will want to have a very good plaster or some other form of covering over the stem wall to protect the bag material. You will want to be careful to maintain that coating for the life of the building. Q: I plan to use a compacted gravel trench foundation, with a 14" wide and 8" thick bond beam sitting on top of that to support the exterior walls, post and beam, with straw clay infill.
I wonder what type of foundation is required for the interior adobe walls. A: To begin with a 14 or inch x 8-inch gravel trench. The NM Earthen Buildings Code specifies that the adobe coursing should start at 4 inches above the floor level. That means a grade beam on top of the gravel, or cmu's of the knock-out or "U" shape to carry rebar and concrete.
Alternatively, the first two courses of adobe bricks should be fully stabilized. The finished adobe floor will come to the top of the exterior wall's bond beam. Which I call a grade beam. This might not be permitted by the Earthen Bld Code, as above. If I use gravel trench for interior walls, how deep, and will I need an equally large bond beam?
Is a bond beam necessary to tie the buildings foundation together? The gravel filled trench does a fine job of spreading the building load and tying the building together at the bottom as long as the local soil is stable and not moving. The Code does not necessarily recognize this fact. It will be passive solar design, post and beam, with light straw clay infill for exterior walls, adobe floor. At least two major walls on the interior are to be 10" thick adobe brick wall.
These are in the south rooms of the building and will serve as solar mass. These are non bearing walls. One runs parallel to the roof trusses above. This connects with the south exterior wall.
The other will be midway beneath the trusses, and will run perpendicular to them. Loading, however, will be on adequate post and beam structure for that wall. I plan to use a compacted gravel trench foundation, with a 14" wide and 8" thick bond beam sitting on top of that to support the exterior walls, post and beam, with straw clay infill.
A: For your interior walls a gravel trench that is four inches wider on each side will be fine. There should be 8-inches of gravel and as long as you are on undisturbed earth, there is no need to go down to the frost line.
Myself and PG McHenry never did the concrete grade beam as we call it but just started with the adobe coursework right on top of the gravel. It would be advisable to have the adobe walls start about four inches above the mud floor for protection from the possibility of a burst pipe somewhere in the future or the possibility of moisture wicking up from the floor.
Solid ground ties the building together well enough at the bottom so the concrete is optional or something to get adobe above exterior grade and interior floor levels. Q: Is it possible to establish a lawn around an adobe house? I'm considering using native, drought resistant grass blue grama but have been told that a lawn and an adobe house are not compatible. A: The traditional adobe house enjoyed flowers and other plants at some distance from the house and kept the soil around the house free of plants, well packed and sloped to drain water away from the house.
If your house has a modern foundation that is waterproof and has a membrane or tar on top of the cement to stop upward migration of water into the adobe, then a lawn will be fine. Q: I used to live in Logan in Northern Utah and the land moved a lot causing many broken foundations.
One old house across the street had a fine foundation. When I asked the elderly Lady who lived there about it she told me that it had had some work done now and then. She also said that the thing she found most interesting was the last contractor had told her that the interior part of the foundation was adobe brick. She didn't know what it was covered with.
The house itself was built around WW1 and was a stick built house. Was the contractor just confused? If not how would this be done? A: That's a great story and I hope its true.
Adobe bricks can tolerate some movement without a house being totally damaged but we would rather is did not have to move. If the adobes were used below grade there might have been stucco or parging as it is called on a foundation.
Logan is a fairly dry climate and if there is not much water in the surrounding soil then adobe bricks would hold up over the years. Modern codes don't allow us to place adobes below grade and that is a reasonable rule. Sometimes we find old houses that broke the rule before it was written and the houses have survived just fine.
Q: We are planning to build an adobe home on our farm in Montrose, CO. The soils on our farm are "expansive clay", meaning that there is not a single concrete pad in the county which has not buckled unless it was poured in the last decade using post-tension concrete, which we will use for out pad.
A: Montrose! Friends don't let friends live in Montrose. Delta, Gunnison, Rifle maybe. Paonia has citizens building grade beams on gravel trenches. If Montrose has such expansive soils that post- or pre-tensioned concrete is needed, then the brutal weight of adobe walls might even do in those high tech solutions.
The rough frame is then nailed to these nailers. To allow for finishing, the rough frame should be made about 3 inches 8 cm. The tops of all masonry walls except post adobe are tied together with bond beams. This is because all walls tend to spread and crack unless tied together at the top. The bond beam is usually concrete, a minimum of 4 inches 10 cm.
Build your forms for the bond beams from 1 X 8 or 2 X 8 lumber. Nail the bottom of the lumber to the wall and tie the top edges together with metal brackets or pieces of 1- to 2-inch 2. The rebar can be supported on pieces of wire nailed between the two sides of the forms or on vertical rebar.
At this point you will also need to place in the bond beam some sort of anchoring method to be used in securing the roof. You can mix your own concrete for these bond beams at a ratio of 1 part cement to 2 parts sand to 3 parts gravel, or you can buy ready-mix concrete. I have seen builders mix the concrete for the bond beam in a wheelbarrow, but if you plan to mix it yourself, you will save a tremendous amount of work by renting a small cement mixer.
You may also use heavy wooden bond beams on top of the walls. These wooden bond beams should be a minimum of 4 inches 10 cm thick, and the ends and corners should be fastened together securely. Lintels are simply bridges over openings in the walls where windows and doors will be. These lintels should be 12 inches 30 cm. Extend the lintel 6 to 9 inches cm. The tops of all window and door rough bucks the wooden window and door frames are the bottoms of the lintel forms.
Since lintels are essentially a thickening of the bond beam over doors and windows, it is probably easiest to make all forms together and pour the concrete as one piece. You may also use wooden lintels over all window and door openings. These must extend 12 to 18 inches cm. In earthquake areas, one way of meeting the code is to utilize both horizontal and vertical steel reinforcing rods rebar in the walls.
Vertical rebar is placed on 2- to 4-foot 0. If you are building a single-brick-width adobe wall, split the adobes to allow for the rebar, or drill holes in the brick.
If you are building a double-brick adobe wall, the vertical rebar will run between the bricks. Tie a double wall together with pieces of rebar 12 inches 30 cm. With both single- and double-brick walls, you must place lengthwise horizontal rebar every third course.
Post adobe construction has been utilized in California for many years, producing some attractive contemporary homes. This post and beam construction then supports the roof, which is built directly on the frame.
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