The Laundry Room Brick Floor

Here is a picture of the work in progress.

The laundry room is an earthbag room about 90 SF (12' X 10' oustide edge to edge), and was originally built with an earthen floor.  Well, while we were out of town shortly after the room was finished, a PVC pipe joint broke and lots of water poured onto the floor, and it swelled and buckled and heaved and cracked and generally was rendered unusable.  About a month ago I started digging it out bit by bit and replacing it with a brick floor, seen here.

The bricks are heavy pavers, the kind used on city streets.  I began by smoothing a sand bed where the bricks would go, then lined them out in a pattern with about 1/2" joints, and tried my darndest to level them in a row across the room.  The result has been a very rustic, if not exaclty level, floor.  I've laid another course since this picture was taken, so the floor is easily half finished.  I'll have to snap some photos of the walls, especially the north wall, which was partially destroyed by the leak, and which I am in the process of re-plastering.

The Wellhouse

I started building a new wellhouse around the existing one back in August.  I dug an 18" deep trench and filled it with rubble and rock, then laid down a stem wall of broken concrete chunks, often referred to as urbanite.  Then I ran a couple of courses of rock filled bags, and the rest of the bags have a good sand/clay soil mixture.  I'm about halfway there.

Two weeks ago I laid on the first layer of cob plaster over half of the bags on the south side, mostly to protect them from UV.  In working with earthbag building before on our laundry room, I had the unfortunate experience of haveing several of the bottom layer bags disentegrate, spilling their guts everywhere.  Not good.  It takes suprisingly little time for these bags to disentegrate in summer sun.

Once I get the walls to roof height, I plan to tear down the existing wooden wellhouse and then roof the new earthbag wellhouse.  The new wellhouse will be about 15' in diameter and only just tall enough to allow a stock door to be framed in.  Eventually I will brew and ferment in this building.

Hyperadobe

   If you're into natural building, you have likely heard of adobe, and you have likely heard of earthbags, but you may not have heard the term "hyperadobe."  I stumbled across it a month or so ago while reading about earthbag building, and it's a very cool method of building with earth that combines adobe and earthbag methods.  Here is link to an informative lesson on the method.

http://www.earthbagbuilding.com/articles/hyperadobe.htm

   I've also found a supplier of the continuous roll rachel netting required to construct as shown in the above link.  This company is in Canada, and I'm set to order 200 feet of their rachel tubing to do some experiments with.  The problem is that shipping is high from Canada, but if you buy a whole roll it comes out pretty cheaply per foot.  Here's the response I got from www.bagsupplies.com:

From: Maurice Wilson | BAG Supplies Canada Ltd [mailto:info@bagsupplies.ca]
Sent: Thursday, September 06, 2012 8:02 PM
To: Cummings, Colin P.
Subject: Re: raschel tube netting rolls

Hello Colin,

Thank you for your email.  We sell in rolls of 3,200 ft x 16" loose width.  Will stretch to a max width of 20"Colour Orange.  Price in USD$ 241.00 per roll x our store. We await your reply, thank you for now.

Kind regards,

Maurice Wilson.

   More to follow on my hyperadobe experiences.  For now I'm working with polypropylene woven bags, cramming them with my silty-clay soil and any sand I can find.  Brutal labor.

Intro

This is the place where I will post at random intervals details about what I'm building, baking, brewing, growing, fermenting, cooking, or just plain thinking about doing.  More to follow, but if you like homemade bread, beer, and buildings, you'll probably enjoy this.