Better Pictures of the House

This is a bit of a better pic of the house. The best place to see the house is at the blog we just set up for our hosts. They have a great picture with labels and everything. Their blog can be found at "earthwoodwaimate.blogspot.com"

You can see here an example of one of the walls that we built. These three rows took us about an hour and a half. Its amazing how quickly the progress comes. Very satisfying. You can only go three high at a time and then you have to wait a week for those rows to dry before you can stack on top of it. In this pic you can also see the window that Wal (the father here) and I built to sit in this wall. Ok, we didn't actually build the window. They bought the actual window at a garage sale a few years ago but we did build the frame and get it all built into the wall.

Here's a good picture of the bricks before they are in the wall. Each brick is 300mm x 300mm and weighs 20 kilos. So that's about a foot square and nearly 45lbs each. When you build the wall you do it like you do with legos so that the seams on one row line up with the mid-points on the row about and below. Because of this at the ends of the walls you need extra long bricks. The big ones are 300mm x 450mm and weigh 30 kilos. They require a lot of effort when you are moving them.
Building a wall is really a team effort. First we have to line up all of the bricks on the wall to make sure they fit. Many bricks need to be broken of chipped to accommodate rebar, windows and posts. Then each brick has to be lifted and dunked into water. While one person is dunking everyone else is gloping mud onto the wall as mortar. Once the mud is in place the brick is put into position and the process repeats. Its a lot of fun but it is very messy.

Working on the walls is hard work and it is best to do when the weather is good because everyone ends up wet and muddy so we only really do that if the weather is cooperating. Other days we spend working on other things. We have been doing a lot of gardening and today we worked on putting up a fence/native tree barrier that will act as a wind/ugly houses break. This is a picture of the line we were working on today. You can see the fence posts and wire on the left. Tomorrow we will put up windbreak stuff on the wires. On the ground you can see a whole ton of used carpet. Rusty (the mother here) is really into reusing things from the reclaimed resources center (the dump). The idea with the carpet is that it will keep the weeds at bay while the new trees are growing up. We will cover it all with mulch before we are done.

Ok, well that's all for today.

Weather Report: Today was very warm but windy as can be. T-shirt and jeans but my hat was on very tight.

Matt