As a test project for working with earthen materials I’m planning to build a small tool/storage shed. For the wall system I’m using cast In-situ Adobe T-brick technique. With traditional adobe, bricks are made in large forms on the ground. Once the bricks have dried they are used to construct the wall. With the T-brick…

The plan is to put in a rubble trench foundation. A rubble trench is a trench filled with rubble or gravel. Clever eh? The benefits are of the rubble trench are: No concrete required. The trench will be filled up to grade level and the building will be built directly on it. The rubble drains…

The Mattock We spend part of the Labor day weekend leveling and widening the foundation trench. I bought a Mattock on Friday which made the work significantly easier. We had planned to pick up gravel today but the supplier was closed for the Labor day holiday so instead we built a form that hopefully make…

I had planned on starting installation of the french drain and rubble trench foundation today but unfortunately/fortunately it rained earlier in the week. According to my parents’ neighbor it was a real gully washer clocking around 4 inches. So, the formerly rock hard soil has gotten a little squishy, especially the lower end of the…

The last thing Jean told me before she left for the UK was that I had better finish the shed project before she gets back or else. The trench was a little soggy still but I decided to press on with the french drain installation for fear what that else may be (Although, I’m hoping…

Finished up the installation of the french drain and went through two and a half cubic yards of gravel today. Getting kind of tired of gravel. Here we are in the process of covering up the perforated tubing. As an aside, Google hasn’t been very forthcoming in answering a burning question I have. The french…

The last load of gravel for a grand total of five cubic yards. There are 27 cubic feet in a cubic yard. The trench is averages around 22″ wide X 12″ deep X 48 linear feet. I calculate that at 88 cubic feet or 3.25 cubic yards. Maybe it’s all that tamping Tampity, tamp, tamp…

Dad finished up the forms earlier in the week so we were able pour the footer today. A footer is the surface on which the building rests. In stick frame structures typically use a concrete footer. A footer serves a couple of purposes: 1) It helps distribute the weight of the building. In a stick…

Laying out the forms for the first course. We have five 12″X12″ forms and one 18″X12″ form. Forms are all filled in. Now for the moment of truth, removing the first form. It’s had roughly half an hour to set up The form slid off fairly easily And the block kept its large fudge like…

The Buda area got somewhere in the vicinity of 20 inches of rain in the past two weeks. Buda gets on average 37 inches of rain per a year. So, I was anxious/excited to see what kind of damage the flood had done to our little construction project. My Mom had looked under the tarp…

If you can’t image molten lava cake, it looks like this While it was overcast and kind of gloomy most of the weekend it didn’t rain which awesome. I was able to work on the the shed most of Friday and Sunday afternoon. The blocks I made last week looked really good. No slumping! My…

While the rain this weekend kept me from getting in any construction, it do give me the opportunity to revisit my original design and make some revisions. Here’s what I came up with.

Sunny days (or weekends rather) have returned at last. I knocked out the rest of the third course and made some modifications to my forms. Quite a bit of water is still pooled on the tarp These forms have been on for a couple of weeks now The 18″ and corner forms have a tendency…

I had a few days off the week of Christmas so I was able to knock out the fourth and fifth course. About a quarter of the fourth course left to complete Another issue I’m having with deadmen besides some cracking is that the deadmen cause the forms to stick. Here’s one I flipped over.…

My Mom forbade me from doing any work on the shed Christmas day. She didn’t say anything about Boxing day though. I finished off the last of the dirt pile and made it about half way through the sixth course. Almost half way through the sixth course. Checking level. I’m keeping a close eye to…

Friday morning I had to pick up our car from the shop. Jean offered to give me a ride but it was such a nice day I decided to cycle. Plans are in the works to build a pedestrian/bike bridge up above but until then… Fording Barton Creek It’s been a couple of weeks since…

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve received lots of parental and spousal support to push the wall past the halfway point. From now on there are more courses behind us than ahead. Yay! I left the walls uncovered during the week and the seventh course dried up quite nicely. My drier mix caused the…

Checked off the 10th course yesterday and made a good start on the llth today. That brings the wall height to around five feet. The reach is beginning to get difficult. We’re making do with step ladders for now but the time for scaffolding will be here soon. Adobe T-Brick Building: A Composition Beginning of…

So, I finally tricked someone who doesn’t have the same last name as me into coming out and working on the shed. Cassandra is a good friend of ours who shares an interest in natural building. She’s such a good a friend and so interested in natural building that she spent all day Saturday with…

When I was child, it seemed that whenever we had relatives visiting we would inevitably have some project going on. I remember laying down sod, doing decking and roofing with aunts, uncles and cousins. So, it’s only keeping with family tradition that within a couple of hours of landing we had Jean’s parents working on…

After two months of skiving off we’re finally getting back to it. My friend Jeremy and his indentured servants joined us Saturday to finish off the 14th course and get into the fifteenth. Looks like our little building is outgrowing its tarps. Some water damage. Good thing it’s easy to patch Jeremy on the wall…

Over the past month central Texas has been experiencing some extreme rain events which causes problems for us on several fronts: 1) The yard where we get our dirt from closes down in wet weather (sometimes for days) because their equipment gets stuck.2) With a wetter mix of the forms have to stay on longer,…

“We sit in the mud… and reach for the stars”  – Ivan Turgenev “Another one [course] bites the dust.” – Queen On a rare sunny day we knocked out the 17th course. Only one more to go! Those tendrils are poly strapping. They’ll secure the bond beam to the last two courses serving to tie…

Summer has definitely arrived. It got up to a balmy 96 degrees today with a heat index over 100 degrees. Fortunately, the heavy lifting is just about over. Over last Friday and today we knocked out the 18th (and final) course. Whew! Installed the door lintel Western wall complete! Yay! The good thing about 90+…

Here’s a design I came up with this weekend for a monoslope roof. Granted, it’s not terribly original nor natural it should do the job and be relatively easy to construct. Sheathed with plywood and metal panels. Here’s the framing detail for the roof. We’ll infill the side jack walls with cob and wine bottles(something…

Sorry for the reporting delay. I started getting these on my computer: The dreaded BSOD And it’s taken me a couple of weeks to get it sorted out. All is well now though. We’re on to the conventional building portion of our natural building project. Natural roofing options are few and tend to be difficult…

We collected several interesting larger bottles whilst gathering beer bottles for the bottle wall on the south wall. I decided to put them to use infilling the western and eastern pony walls. I mixed up a batch of cob with an extra helping of straw. As the infill is as much bottle as well I…

This weekend we attached the rafters, fascia boards and installed the decking. It’s beginning to look very roof like. Cutting a short rafter to install on the pony wall. Sure is nice to have a shady work space. Installing the short rafter on the pony wall. All rafters are attached apart from ones on either…

Give a cob house a good pair of boots and a good hat and she’ll last forever. – Old English saying O frabjuous day! It’s been a long time coming but the shed now has permanent rain protection. Hurrah! First task of the day was trimming off the decking extending out past the flying rafters…

Apart from finishing securing the metal panels I took a breather from the shed this weekend. At the end of this month it will be a year since I started the project. Here are a couple of time lapse videos I put together of our progress thus far.

This thresholds needs some TLC After the push to get the roof on, I took a couple of weeks off from the shed. It was nice knowing that as August turn unseasonably wet the it wasn’t going to melt away. I got back to business last week. There are still lots of details to go…

So I managed to cajole my bride into spending her Labor day working on the shed. We got a lot done including installing the door frame, a screen window and some mud detail work. Passing cob balls through the window The threshold solidified quite nicely Capping the walls inside Installing the door frame. It took…

We had a relatively cool August which gave me false hope that September would be more fallish rather than summerish. So with the building pretty well protected I felt I could skive off until cooler temperatures arrive. A few days this month I’ve dabbled with the first leveling coat of plaster. The walls are pretty…

Wall plastered a week before Work goes on in the plastering department. Sifting out the bigger lumps makes a huge difference. The plaster applies well and looks good. When it dries it you can run your hand along the wall and nothing sloughs/dusts off like it did before plastering. However, some hairline cracks are still…

Shredded Paper The exterior plaster work is drawing to a close. Well, for now at least. We’ll see how it looks after the rain storm next week. But for now, it’s looking pretty good. I’m still struggling a bit with cracking. I’ve been playing with different ratios of sand clay and straw over the past…

In case your wondering I have not finished/given up on the shed. It’s been a bit cold and rainy, weather that’s not conducive plastering. I built some exterior shelves on the back (north side) of the building. I’m planning to use the shelving to stack lumber. Reasoning for this placement is as follows: Sunlight can…

I haven’t been slacking off the past few weeks. It’s just I haven’t had the most interesting pictures to post. I’m about ready to call the interior plaster finished and start preparations for the floor. After some clean up, the bottle windows in the pony walls are looking pretty good. Cleaning up the bottle window

While I have quite a list of future extensions to the T-Brick shed (including but not limited to, rain water collection system, biogas digester, solar panels, more shelving and more cob sculpture) we’re moving on to what I’m going to consider for the near future the final phase of this project, the floor. With the…

I finished the poured adobe portion of the floor today. The section we did last week was still too wet to walk on so I estimate we have at least two weeks to wait before we can think about sealing it with boiled linseed oil. I’m sure I can find something to keep me busy…

After the floor dried completely I applied a thin (1/4″ – 1/2″) layer of a sand/clay mix (approximately 80/20 ratio) over the entire floor to fill in cracks and provide a base to lay some saltillo tiles in the entry way. I also used  the mixture as grout between the tiles. After about a week…

Yes, a very exciting moment the shed’s life. We have shelves now.