In Summer 2012, my daughter Eva and her friends Beth and Tim worked with me to build walls for our Compressed Earth Block house. We finished the wall with four windows in it: two windows for each daughter’s bedroom. Then we moved on to the kitchen wall, which we were able to build about 5 feet tall before school started and took away my helpers.
In September 2012 the house looked like this. Here’s the southern wall, which is the longest wall in the house, measuring 80 feet. About 68 of those feet are made with earthen block. Charles and the teenagers and I installed the lintels ourselves. We rigged up a pulley, but still needed to guide and lift the heavy pieces with our own muscles.
Here’s that 4-window wall from the inside. Looking at this photo fills me with nostalgia! The place looks so different now. I’m glad we have photos to remind us of how the house developed.
Moving around to the northwest corner, you can see wooden frames around the top of the wall. Present day earthen buildings usually have a reinforced concrete bond beam along the top of the walls. Our bond beam is about 4″ tall, but since the walls are 2 feet thick, we used a lot of concrete.
Charles, our friend Brittney, and I poured this part of the bond beam one autumn day in 2011, using thirty-two 80-pound bags of concrete. A motorized conveyor that brought buckets of concrete up to scaffold level. But our muscles got a workout, carrying buckets from the mixer to the conveyor and lifting the buckets from the conveyor to the top of the walls.
Finally, here’s the northeast corner, an L-shaped section of wall nearly 80 feet long. Once we finished the rest of the house, this little section would seem like a breeze. You can see our stacks of bricks, all sorted by thickness, which varies with the moisture content of the soil. The blue thing is our brick machine, made by AECT, Inc. of San Antonio. Here’s a better photo of it:
