Ella built this entire earthen block castle in one morning. Not only that, she made a mud queen, mud guards, and a mud chicken to run around the castle grounds.
Our house is progressing slightly slower.
At the beginning of August, we started the second of our two inside earthen walls. Here it is, with two layers of brick.
By the end of the month, the inner wall, plus the south and west walls it attaches to, were about five and a half feet tall. I can walk under our mason’s string without having to duck, which is a good thing for the string and me. We can see actual rooms now. Hurray!
The walls are complete with electrical outlet boxes and a switch box. So far, we’ve only marked the spaces where the windows will be. Before we can go any further on the window walls, we have to make up our minds which brand of windows we want. Then we’ll make wooden frames for the rough openings and lay brick right up to the edges of the frames.
Our roof sits on steel beams which are embedded in the walls. To give the beams room to move, which they will in a stiff wind, we devised this chamfered corner treatment. There’s quite a bit of creative brick-chopping involved. You know, triangular pieces and such.
Every now and then someone asks, “How many bricks are you going to need to build this house?”
I don’t know. I’m trying to avoid knowing. I’m afraid that knowing the enormous number of bricks we need will discourage me. For now, it’s better to make bricks, build walls until we run out, and then make bricks again.
We’ve made enough bricks now to have perfected our block-making routine. The AECT block-making machine sits next to the house. Its conveyors go onto the front porch. We have about a dozen pallets arranged on the slab.
Jerry loads the hopper with dirt, using my dad’s little tractor. The machine makes about 300 blocks per hour, which keeps Jerry and the tractor pretty busy.
The machine keeps three brick stackers busy, too. We measure each block as it comes out, then carry that 40-pound rascal to a pallet with other blocks of its size. Given the choice to sort now or sort later, we found that sorting now saves a lot of time and muscle. Here, Alex and Eva are ferrying bricks to their proper pallets.
After a morning of block-making, we can truthfully say, “We made a ton of bricks!”
