| Mudding the walls |
 |
 |
 |
| With the glass in, and the building starting to be more weather-proof, it was time to decide how to finish the interior walls. Among the choices to consider are adobe, stucco, cement-plaster, "shot crete", or other commercial plasters. From the beginning, I wanted earthen walls. They look fantastic when they are finished. Since we were so far behind, however, we considered using a different finish. One that we could pay someone else to do. We also tried to find someone locally that works with adobe, but we were unable to. I'm sure there is someone here, but we sure couldn't find them. I talked to many different people about our options but |
| the most convincing argument came from an experienced mud slinger that has done several Earthships. His comment was something like "PLEASE, don't shot-crete your beautiful Earthship!" So we decided that although it would take us longer to do, the only prudent choice would be adobe. As previously mentioned, and on advice from Earthship Biotecture (formally Solar Survival Architecture), we used cement and one can as our initial pack-out layer. This is to help waterproof the wall and to help lock |
| the tires together, although using cement is not totally necessary. Our second layer was mud. We just mixed dirt, sand and unchopped straw and started filling holes. We purchased really cheap sand, and fill dirt (since we are building on a flat piece of land, we didn't have extra site dirt). The sand had big rocks and clumps of clay, so we sifted it with a piece of 1/4" hardware cloth and then mixed 12 shovel of dirt to 18 of sand and put 4 big fistfulls of unchopped straw into the mix. We mixed it by hand (or by foot) at first which was pretty neat, but eventually it rubbed our skin off and we switched to using the cement mixer. Once the mix was sticky and |
| not too wet, we put it onto the walls and stuck two cans in. It is very important to not put too much mud on at once, but you also don't want to have to do 9 or 10 coats, so it's a fine line. We could have had a thicker first coat which would have made coats 3 and 4 easier and faster. |
| On the third coat, we changed the mix, although I don't remember why. We started to use much more dirt and much less sand. As this layer dried it cracked, not bad enough to be redone, but bad enough to tell us we'd screwed up! We switched back to the mostly sand recipe and there was no more cracking. Another lesson that we've learned: all along the way we poked holes into the wet mud with our fingers. During our last work party a few people skipped this step. As a result, the next layer of mud didn't stick to the previous one. There were several places where the mud was loose and pulling away from the wall. We pulled these off, drilled holes into the previous layer and mudded them again. Layer 4 is hopefully our last coat before our true scratch coats. We've chopped the straw and added a little more sand to the mix. This time we've covered the electrical conduit and only a small bit of the tires poke out. After this coat, I anticipate one partial coat to fill in areas that are still recessed (particularly around the circumfrence of the cistern walls inside; because they curve to the outside, the spaces between the tires are much larger, which requires more coats of mud), and then we can work on scratch coat(s) and the finish coat. |
| I am VERY glad that we chose to use adobe. It is fun to work with, it's pretty easy and I think the results are going to be amazing. Most people probably don't realize how hard adobe is once it's dried. Well....it's REALLY hard! I tested some spots with a hammer and I did very little damage, no more than any other wall surface. In my opinion adobe is the way to go! |
 |
 |
| Back to the Index |
 |
 |