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.