For flooring materials received last autumn, I owe D&L many hours of labor which will be burned off mostly helping D put a veranda all the way around their new house.
They’ve spent several-going-on-many years building their wonderful strawbale-and-earthbag extravaganza. Remember Woodhenge? It’s all grown up now, though interior work continues.
But sometimes you learn that builders got away from those all-natural materials for good reason. D&L spent most of a summer stuccoing the outside of their house with home-made adobe, and it hasn’t worked well at all.
So, new plan. The north side of the house already has a long covered porch, and that wall has no problem. Now D is building a veranda around the whole rest of the house. It’ll either look really good or rather peculiar, but it’s the way it’s gotta be.
Step one, complete: Dig a whole bunch of holes. As I recall, there’s just shy of 30 new columns. This being D&L, each hole must be precisely placed, and must measure precisely 12X12X18 deep. Imprecision is not tolerated at Casa Del OCD. We spent a lot of time on these holes.
Next step, in progress: Rebar for the foundations.
To complete these requires 240 short lengths of rebar, and cutting them was my job for the morning. D made a jig to guide the length of each cut, because precision.
Meanwhile D tied the rebar for each foundation.
Next week the concrete for the foundations will be delivered. Once we’ve poured all those, we’ll tie more rebar for the lower portions of the columns, set Sonotube, and pour lots more concrete. Then comes the actual construction. I expect this to take the whole summer, off and on, until Monsoon.
I’ve lived with the OCD type and sympathize… I truly WANT OCD attention to detail in my brain surgeon, and probably in those who build airplanes and spaceships… but adding a porch to deflect the rain under those conditions would certainly be challenging to the non- OCD helpers. Bless you… at least you can go home to the non-critical “boys” at the end of the day. 🙂
Lime plaster, Joel. Lime plaster. Multiple coats. Wash off the adobe and put on lime plaster. Seal it. Wait for Monsoon. The reason the north side has no problems may have nothing to do with the veranda and everything to do with wind direction and shelter from nearby structures/things that are lifting the wind/rain/snow up and over that side of the house.
“Casa Del OCD”
Oh my gosh Joel, that made me laugh this morning, thanks! Laughing while planning to use that little gem on certain people in my life, with your permission, of course. 😉
Miss Violet
Or he could have bought a few 5 gal. buckets of colored acrylic render and slapped it on the adobe and been good.
Course if he had thought of that he would not have used dried mud as a finish in the first place.
🙂 You don’t understand.
These people spent months – months! painting the walls of a single bathroom. Their home-made concoction kept crazing on the adobe stucco. So they scraped it down, changed the mixture, and did it again. And again. Repeat. Eventually they succeeded. Then they went on to paint the rest of the house.
And when I suggested that a gallon of Kilz would make their problems go away, the suggestion was firmly rejected. L had decided on some sort of milk paint, and some kind of milk paint it would be.
They’re not completely silly about it. The roof, for example, is conventional corrugated metal. In a house made of straw, the roof is not the place to experiment. But nearly everything else is one sort of experiment or another. And D&L are quite relaxed to the fact that sometimes experiments don’t go as hoped.
They’ve been working on this thing, just the two of them, seven days a week since sometime in 2008. I wish I could show you what they’ve accomplished, it’s marvelous. But it’s more of a journey than a destination, if you take my meaning.
“They’re not completely silly about it. ”
Rebuttal:
Yes they are. I was born in an adobe house(well…no, a hospital, but went to the adobe a few weeks later) that dear ol’ dad™ built his own self. The awesome: three foot thick walls. The not: re-coating it every few years. You have to do that in the desert anyway. Like Zelda said; lime wash…..just use the force and make them lime wash it. The veranda might not be the solution they think it is.
Yeah yeah…I know….OCD trumps what has worked on this continent for a few centuries…..
Hey, not my house.