Offgridburbia

A) I wanted to give the footer/grade beam a little more time to dry out.
B) There was an Earthbag blitz this weekend!

Earthbag uses the same adobe mix as T-brick but rather than using a rigid wooden form to build the walls it uses raschel bags. Raschel are the mesh bags that onions and potatoes from the supermarket come in. In this workshop we continued work on the Earthbag house that Jean and I worked on in June/July.

 Here’s a brief summary of what happened in June/July workshop:

The foundation trench

The rubble filled foundation trench

The concrete grade beam/footer

The first course

Several courses later we were realizing that our mix was too wet

We made some corrections to the wall and tried using a drier mix.

This about where we finished in July. Note how the upper courses are looking a lot better than the lower courses.

A couple of weeks after our course in July a group came out and did course and put in the window bucks. Over the summer I did some intensive reading of earth bag building literature and feel like I got a handle on proper moisture content.

Beginning of Day 2 of the the October workshop. We did two courses yesterday. They’re looking a much better.

Thea leading some of the talk session of the workshop

We did another two courses on day 2.

Meanwhile Thea lead a plaster demonstration

Looking good.