Mud-dauber Wasp demonstrates superiority

I've had a weekend off, but in my absence a tiny little Mud-dauber Wasp appropriated a small corner of the little red window to create an entire purpose-built adobe home for its family, installed the future family in it and stocked the larder with * horror alert * tiny little live paralysed spiders.  Isn't nature grand?

The workwomanship is simply exquisite.  You can just see in the photo the different mud colours.  The wasp has identified that the lighter colour mud from Hepburn is better for building, then it has used our own terra-cotta coloured earth to make it pretty, or camouflage it, or whatever.  It's altogether slightly Attenborough, yes?

The final straw

Gratuitous picture of Trevor

A few hours ago, I placed the final piece of straw in the final light-earth wall.  The structure of the building is done. 

Actually, it was a great way to finish off - I tried out a whole new technique for a different type of wall that we will probably use next time.  More on that later.

Last weekend, TJ put the roof on the bump-out.  That's him on the roof looking groovy with his new hammer drill (a Metabo, replacing the Makita that burned out twice - the Makita fought the shed and the shed won).

This weekend we mudded the last external wall, which was the triangular gable above the window-seat roof.

North wall core completed

The last bit of light earth on the exterior of the building was the gap between the frame and the roof above the new gable panel, to keep critters out of the roof cavity.  I had to get up on the window-seat roof and lie down to get my head and arms underneath the main roof's overhang.  Intensely uncomfortable. 

Gable - done and critter-proofed

You'll notice we buried the raw edge of the window-seat roof in the gable wall.  This is the sort of easy finishing detail you can do with mud but nothing else. It will never, ever leak.

Then we made an interior wall next to where the wood fire will go.

This final wall was an experiment to see if we could make a really solid thin wall, because I think the foot-thick walls on this building slowed us down a bit. If we do this again (TJ needs a woodwork shed) we'll do thinner walls.

The main challenge was to find a way to make the light earth stick firmly to a single stud, instead of having a double-stud "larsens truss" with a cavity in the middle to hold the wall.  After all these months of using bamboo to solve problems, the solution was obvious - TJ drilled holes in the frame and slotted in lengths of bamboo that spanned between solid wood, so when they are buried in a rigid wall they will be completely immoveable. I think in a stud wall for a new building, the bamboo would be horizontal, like a noggin, between vertical studs.

Single stud frame, cement sheeting and bamboo in place

The frame was backed with cement sheeting, to protect from the wood fire.  

Making and positioning the light earth took most of the day, but we completed 3.5m2  - more than double the area we could have built of foot-thick walls.   Don't get me wrong, I adore the thick walls and the curved lintels.  But thinner walls take less than half the time, which is not to be sneezed at - it might have knocked 6 months or more off this project.

Light earth, piggy-back formwork, wall-top technique

The photo above actually shows the last bit of straw we will use in the building.  We ran out of straw at that point and had to scrounge around for fibre to finish the wall.  But it's a good spot to look at the building method, and what we've learned.

Formwork made from scrounged MDF, but reinforced with pine boards.  The pine is offset so one board slots into the one below. In the gap above the top formwork (not usually as big as this, but meh) use a thin metal object like a float, or in this case a plasterer's hawk, and shove the mix in from the side.

And that's it.  The last wall in place.  When I walked outside I looked at the building and it struck me that I've lifted tonnes of mud and straw into place, bit by bit.  And I've grown some muscles, let me tell you.

New wall.  Now it's just fit-out, floor and render

Weekend alone smearing muck onto the walls

On yer marks

I spent last weekend alone and did the thick "parging coat" (undercoat) of render on two wall panels.

I made the job harder for myself by making a really weak, watery render mix on Saturday, which I tried to thicken by adding more fibre.  It was so hard to make that useless muck stick to the walls, I had to abandon my tools and smear it on with bare hands.

Render this - you just need to make mud defy gravity

I made one bucket of stickier render, which I rationed to use on the window surround.  Even then, it threatened to glop off onto the floor every couple of minutes.  I had to keep pushing it in place until it started drying.

Juuuust holding on

Still, I worked at it alone and got the wall finished.  There was a certain amount of "I am woman, hear me roar" going on.

You can almost see how fibrous and nasty the render is from here

Next day, I mixed some render that was extravagant with clay and sloppy as a cow pat. It practically lifted itself onto the wall.

Ta da!

It was peaceful working out there, alone in the bush.  Fresh air, bird-song and fresh food from the garden.  And there's nothing like staring into the corner of a building for two days to make you appreciate the view.

How's the serenity?

Ceilings ... nothing more than ceilings ....

Window seat becomes cosier

Last weekend we put a ceiling on the window seat bump-out, insulated it and finished the walls up to ceiling height. Suddenly the space has a greater feeling of depth and enclosure.

TJ puts up the ceiling boards, blocking out the sky

TJ got some old pine floor boards from a recycled timber yard, cleaned them up a little and put them in place.  That sentence accounts for two days' work!  

When we framed the bump-out we were very careful about the frame being vertical, but less so about it being square.  So there was a certain amount of adjusting and cutting to make the ceiling fit.  Welcome to amateur-land.

We considered at least half a dozen ceiling insulation options.  The main problem was that it's only a small area so there would be heaps of waste using a commercial insulation product.  Then we considered unofficial stuff like loose wool and blankets, until the idea came.

Light Earth insulation

Tucking Light Earth insulation into the ceiling was one of the quickest mud building jobs we've done.  For once, gravity was on our side!  While we were at it, we filled the top of the wall between the windows and the ceiling, so the area is completely enclosed.

TJ adds battens for the tin roof

We've left the insulation to dry under a temporary roof.  We should be able to complete it next weekend.  The other thing we hope to finish next weekend is the gable above the window seat - the last external wall of the mud shed.

Looking in the west wall window

I loves those niches to pieces

Window seat area with windows old and new and a niche - it's shaping up well, yes?

Working on the very shapely north wall and window seat means that every one of those little details that we've been planning for months or even years comes to life.

The latest bit of fun is the niches.  We planned two - one with shelves and one with just a ledge at the bottom.  The challenge was to create some niche-shaped formwork that could sit there while I made a wall around it, then removed later.  I'm not the world's greatest carpenter, so I sweated and worried and procrastinated.  Eventually, I did what comes naturally - improvised!

Wheely good formwork for niche with ledge

The wheelbarrow wheel exploded that day when all the infrastructure failed.  It turned out to be just the size and width I needed for the curved top.

On the last day of our summer holidays we mudded the first niche into place.  That day was a real slog and it was sad letting go of the summer hols, so pulling out the wheel at the end of the day and revealing the niche was a bit special.

Freshly minted niche - still wet, with bamboo in place

I buried lots of bamboo in the wall to hold the curve and support the structure.  I also used three or four strong pieces of bamboo as a lintel buried horizontally above the niche, to spread the weight of the full-thickness wall above the niche to the columns on either side.  But once the wall is dry and set, it takes its own weight nicely, so I snipped out some of the bamboo.

Partly dry, with some bamboo removed

The rest of the bamboo will stay buried in the wall and I'll render over it.  The key-hole shape is accidental, but I kind of like it.  Later on I'll decide whether to snip out a bit of straw to make the walls straight, or leave it like that.

Last weekend we finished the last full-height wall of the building (whoo!), which contains a matching niche with three shelves.

Wet wall: niche with three shelves all wrapped up, ready for the big reveal

The shelves are meant to look like they are just sitting in mud, but really they are attached to a strong framework buried in the wall.  The photo at the top of this page shows the niche in the wall, and the context.

It is soooo hot here.  I'm writing this in the shade, waiting out the heat of the day so we can work again in the evening.  Hopefully it will drop below 30oC because we are putting a ceiling on the window seat area and it is very exposed work.  

North wall! Finally! Whoo!

Still life of new wall in setting sun

Yesterday the north wall finally starting taking on some bulk and shape (not to mention a window in a frame - booyah).  

That's the thing about Light Earth; once the details of ordinary building are completed and some dodgy formwork made, the walls grow quickly.  More quickly yesterday, because above waist-height, most walls are only 10cm wide, instead of 25cm.  

It was very interesting watching the inside of the building change in character as it became enclosed.  

The most notable change is the acoustic, which is shaping up to be extraordinary - quiet and clean, but what my old musician buddies call "live".  

There's more done, but we ran out of light and decided to leave some of the formwork on overnight.  And speaking of formwork, it's time for the January 2012 Dodgy Formwork awards!

Dodgy formwork winner

I don't think it's possible for formwork to get any dodgier.  But it did the job. My personal faves are the bit on the corner held on with a clamp, and the bit with the wavy edge.  Why wavy?  It was cut for the shape of the rocks below the window, and we are re-using it here.

Creative special mention

 Why is there a wheelbarrow wheel in the wall cavity?  Watch this space.

Honourable mention for being odd but kinda neat

Patience

Still horizontal and not affixed to any wall

Patience. It's a virtue, apparently.

Two people, three hours and the big northern window is still lazing around on the saw-horses.

Clearly, carpentry is not my forte.  Estimating the amount of time it takes to do carpentry is even less of a forte.  Here's me thinking we'd pick up the replacement glass, pop the window in the wall and get on with some lovely mudding. I mean, we had a huge wooden rectangle frame and two as-yet-unbroken bits of glass.  Join frame A with glass B and get on with it, yes?

The thing is, apparently you need strips of wood around the edge of the window, nailed to the frame to sandwich the glass into the rebate.

This is what three hours looks like

Most people just buy these strips - they're called quad.  But apart from destroying native forest, new hardwood quad would look stupid against the gnarled old second-hand wood of the frame, so we cut these strips from more gnarled old planks.

Then there was measuring, sawing, planing, sanding, oiling, measuring again, sawing again, little beads of silicone, tiny little nails (swinging a hammer less than 1cm from glass!). We're nearly there, but I said that the day before yesterday.

On the bright side, we haven't broken any glass lately.

Fleshing out the north wall

Hopefully the last time you'll see the circle window through that bit of frame

Today we got our hands back into the mud, building the first new bit of Light Earth wall since August.  It was a relief after a few days messing around with carpentry at a snail's pace to get the mud clothes back on.  

We were out of the habit of making the mud slurry and mixing it into the huge barrow load of straw, so the first batch took ages.  Then ten seconds later, whomp, the huge wall cavity had eaten it all up.  I had kind of forgotten how very thick these walls are.  No wonder it's taken over a year to build them.

Nice fat comforting walls 

Tomorrow we fit the big north window - hopefully without breaking it this time.  We picked up the replacement glass today.  And we will build some more walls.  My foolish optimistic hope is to fit the big window and get all the north wall sections filled up to the height of the window seat by the time we stop to cook dinner for some neighbours tomorrow.

Dodgy formwork!  Ah how I've missed it.

Curvaceous

They don't make bullet-proof glass like they used to

Oops

We are a bit dispirited this evening.  The window seat is designed around a couple of pieces of very thick glass TJ picked up when the bank he works above upgraded their security windows.  

One of them fell and broke.  They are both non-standard sizes.  We've been able to order a new piece to match, but everything is delayed.  Also, expensive, and basically we've lost a day's progress.

All this time we thought the glass was bullet-proof because it came out of a bank.  We were going to bury it permanently in the walls, on the basis that nothing would break it.  Luckily we know now, so we have changed things so the glass can be removed and replaced. 

Like the flannel-flower windows, we've been storing this ex-bank glass for years.  Since it was "bullet-proof" (it really is very heavy) we haven't been the least careful with it - in fact, there's a piece from the same lot leaning up against the house.  It falls over every now and then, and we prop it back up.  But it had to break the day we wanted to put it in a wall.

North wall preparation

North wall skeleton getting busier

Yesterday we turned our attention to the north wall - the one with the window seat, the niches and all the carpentry.  As you can see, it has sprouted a couple of windows and some new bamboo teeth.  We have also mortared in the rocks on the outside and some tiles on the inside to make the damp proof-ish base (last use of cement!  Yessssss!) and made some shelves that will be mudded into place later.

There is more bamboo than usual.  Ordinarily the walls are 25cm thick and monolithic - the light-earth core continues through the gaps in the middle of ladder-trusses, tying everything together.  But above the window seat the walls are thinner, with just a single stud frame.  The bamboo spikes and other sticky-outy things are buried in the wall, so the wall sticks to the frame.

Awwwwww

The red and green windows are very pretty and I'm a little bit immoderately thrilled to see them in place at last. I bought them at a garage sale one day in the '90s.  I had a sudden rush of blood to the head when I saw the Australian native flannel flower design, so I committed the clutter-buster sin of buying a used building product without having a use in mind for it.  In fact, at that stage, I had never built anything at all.  

The windows sat in the shed for years.  I resisted all attempts to give them away.  That sort of attachment to material things should have an unhappy ending, so yesterday when I was hammering the bamboo bits into the frame around them my heart was in my mouth.

Today we will finish framing the big northern windows and fit them into the wall, oil the shelves and sills, do something to protect the pretty stuff from the mud that is coming and cut some custom-sized formwork.  One of my jobs is to make some formwork to shape some wall niches.  So, that will be a new experience.

We hope to start making the light-earth walls later this afternoon.  But we'll see.  I thought we'd get all the carpentry and rock work done yesterday, but when you are amateurs like us, it's "measure twice, cut once, spot obvious thing wrong, scratch head ..." etc.  It's silly things sometimes, like bolting something to the wall and having to pull it off again because you can't swing a hammer for the next thing without hitting it.

Mud floor samples 1 and 2 - fail whale

 The mud floor samples we did the other day have completely failed.  That isn't unexpected, because it's just the first try, but what surprised me is that the second sample (right) has worse cracks than the first one.  The first one has more clay.  So, figure that one out, smarty-pants.

For those keeping score, the first sample had two parts hepburn-soil (clay-rich subsoil from my brother's place) for one part brickies-sand, and the second sample had equal parts hepburn-soil and sand.

Games with sand and colour

Colours from nature

Yesterday was one of those days where the infrastructure fails.  After the second flat tyre and the hole in the wheelbarrow the generator had a hissy-fit that upset the sander, which refused to go again until we plugged it into someone's wall socket (whereupon it coughed up a cloud of dust onto their nice clean house).

During breaks from watching things break, we caught up with some friends so there wasn't time to do anything immediately useful on the mud shed.  Instead we played with some leftover sand from the concrete mix, to see if adding sand to mud and cow manure (instead of adding plant fibre) could make a tough enough surface to walk on, because we want to pour a mud floor, if we can get the right mix.

Mud floor sample No.1

We started with half as much sand as clay-soil, then made a mix with equal parts sand and clay-soil.

Mud floor sample No.2 (showing snail trails from being left overnight in the rain!)

They will take a week or so to dry.  I don't think we've found what we're looking for, but we'll see.

Meanwhile, there was leftover floor sample mix, so I decided to add some iron oxide to see what affect that had on the colour, and spread it out as a patch of render on the South Wall, which I think is now the official experimental wall.

Spreads like creamy frosting

It was so light and fluffy that I had trouble smoothing it out without leaving trowel marks, but it was easy enough to use.  

Shiny

The wet colour is gorgeous, like the colour red-box gum leaves go sometimes, but it has started drying to a dusty pink.  It is also cracking way too much, which doesn't bode very well for the floor samples.

After about three hours of drying - the pale areas are the driest

Shifting focus

Welcome visitor

I could spread mud on the walls all day.  It is such a meditative pass-time.  Just me and the wind in the trees and the butterflies that come over for a drink.  

The actions are repetitive, but every moment is slightly different and every section has its challenges, like edges and height. 

One more panel and I'll be half way around the inside of the shed!

It is satisfying to create order out of chaos, by taking a rough lumpy wall and making it smooth.

Some walls are lumpier than others.  The south wall is where I hide the experimental mixes and the first goes at things.  If you come over, don't examine it too closely.  Today I finished the first coat of render and a bit of patching. 

South wall - before

 When that dries, I'm going to have a crack at the second coat of render, just to test the mix and play with colour using oxides.

South wall - after!

Trevor made a neat box for the solar power equipment - the regulator, distributor and so on.  He used a picture frame from the tip and some odd bits of wood.  Now it's there I'm going to have to take some courage and bury a few wires in the walls.

Neato 

He has also made some concrete and poured it into that formwork from the other day. For the next few days we will shift focus from my jobs (mud) to TJ's tasks (carpentry and heavy stuff). Time to get cracking on that north wall and the floor.

Concrete at high tide, waiting for an earthen floor