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Saturday, Nov. 10, 2001. With the upcoming cobbing sessions in mind, we had to take care of a few smaller chores to prepare the site for some serious wall building. First, Ari poured gravel into some of the floor space to make it more level. Then he filled up the gap between ground and the foundation on the outside, because both of us kept falling into that gap often and we didn't want anybody to break an ankle. Terri made more progress on the toilet plumbing, although she came just short of installing the pipes because she realized that she needed some more parts. She also collected all our yet-to-be-used rocks on the northern side of the house, as the south side is done and we don't want people tripping over these rocks. Then we put another layer of rocks to the northern foundation. We even did one batch of cob before the end of the day.
Because we put gravel on both outside and inside of the foundation, we no longer can see the bottom few layers of the foundation. This makes it hard for anyone to see how much work was put into the area underground. There is 2.5 feet of gravel and 3 layers of rock down there!
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Terri is working on the toilet flange. Which way should it go? Where is the vent? The struggle of first-time plumber cotinues... |
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Here is our clay pit. We had a large pile of clay we dug from the foundation space, but it's been months since we dug it out so the clay has been completely dry, making it too difficult to wet and mix it into cob. So Ari made a pit in the middle of the pile last weekend to soak some clay in water. It works! |
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Some of our first layer of cob on the southern wall. The holes you see have two functions. One, to ensure that the inside dries up. Two, to let water sink in when we wet it again to sew the next layer on top of it. |
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Another view of the cob. This is roughly two batches of cob. Our batch of cob consists of one 5-gallon backet of sand plus the same amount of clay, with water and straw. |
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The northern foundation. You can see the gravel filling the gap on the outside of it. It really looks like there are only a couple of layers of rocks there, but there are a lot more underneath! |
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This is one of the test bricks we made a couple of weeks ago. One to one clay to sand ratio. It is very strong. |