Sorry about that – I gather from the traffic numbers, or lack of same, that I wasn’t the only person who couldn’t get on the blog yesterday. TUAK piggybacks off another site, and sometimes I think the provider got the server that runs that site out of a giant economy-size Cracker Jack box. Or something – I really don’t know what that was about, but we seem to be back.
Nothing was going on yesterday anyway: It’s Uncle Joel’s Singing For His Supper Week. Arsenic caps yesterday and today, and then something that might turn out interesting but is certain to be strenuous: I have to fulfill the terms of my indenture to D&L. Last fall I traded a bunch of my time for their unused flooring materials, and the time has come to pay up.
D&L build their house from straw – among a great many other things, but the straw is the problem because despite spending months in the hot sun slathering adobe mud on the outside walls the mud has proven insufficient protection from the weather. So now they need to retrofit a veranda around the entire circumference of their enormous house. And I’m elected to help do it.
But that doesn’t start till tomorrow. Today it’s back to arsenic caps, the most tedious job ever devised by the dark, satanic mind of man.
“the most tedious job ever devised by the dark, satanic mind of man. ”
I take it you never worked on an automotive assembly line. There’s a reason the job of putting one bolt on one part over-and-over-and-over-again pays at least $16/hr: it minimizes death-by-boredom.
Has there been a veranda test section done that shows the adobe mud was protected for at least a year? because it would be sad to invest all that work to find out a year from now that it didn’t help. Have alternative solutions been investigated or installed in a test section? There are a lot of additives for the bricks but you are beyond that. Surface treatments include lime plaster (it breathes, cement holds moisture in) and linseed oil rubbed on, asphalt, waterglass, polymers. For future building projects, lime plaster is a more weather resistant finish for straw bales than adobe mud but it needs at least annual maintenance. You could wash/chip off all the adobe mud and start over with lime plaster…or not…
Has there been a veranda test section done that shows the adobe mud was protected for at least a year?
Yeah, the whole north side is covered and that’s the one wall they don’t have trouble with.