Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Charmaine R Taylor
Building for free; a wonderful concept that can be put into practice by
anyone looking to create shelter for man or animal. Homesteaders and
people seeking a simpler life are amazingly ingenious at discovering
alternatives to store bought, high priced, over- processed goods. And
the "waste" generated by our consumerist culture makes for a happy
hunting ground across the entire country. Most of us know how to
scrounge for windows and doors, recycle, and barter for used cabinets,
fixtures, yard sale and demolition materials. But beyond that are truly
free building materials generated by the Earth herself.
Using earth to make walls and houses has been done for thousands of
years. It isn't a new concept in the US either. In the 1920s the US
government promoted rammed earth for farm buildings, and produced
booklets on soil testing, adobe brick making, and earthen house
construction. In the 1970s Ken Kern actively experimented and wrote
about clay-lime-straw-asphalt emulsion formulas for hand built walls.
He created several curved, passive solar buildings on his homestead in
California using free materials. His books taught owner-builders to
experiment, and use on-site, healthy materials for their homes.
Clay, sand, rocks, straw, woodchips, sawdust, and even weeds can be
put to use to build the entire house. And that is the beauty of using
nature's gifts-readily available, unwanted and uncommercialized, with
no profit in restricting your access to grass, weeds, river or beach sand,
clay or rubble. In fact, clearing away scrap shrub and weeds is seen as
an improvement to most property! Most of what you need can be found
in your own back yard, down the road, or in a local field or stream.
The only item which must be purchased for some of the building mixes
described here is hydrated lime, sold in 50 pound sacks, at supply and
home improvement retailers, or feed & grain stores, and costing $6-$9.
Most regions in the US will have some type of clay under the topsoil. If
there is none on your property the best way to locate it is to look for
deep road cuts where construction is going on. Or, the walls of a river
bank or stream will usually yield the stickier gray-gold clays. Once
found the clay can be treated in a couple different ways. It can be sun
and air dried, then crushed and remixed with water when you're ready
to build. Or you can simply dump large chunks of fresh dug-up clay
into a drum and let it soak in water for months. Most clay will fall apart
and become pudding-like, but gumbo clay will remain impervious to
water unless broken up into small pieces.
If you live in a sandy soil area and want to experiment you can
purchase finely powdered bagged kaolinite clay. A 50 pound sack,
mined locally in Sacramento, CA, is $3, but it may be more expensive
in your area. Mixing the fine kaolinite powder into clean water is easy,
but wear a dust mask to prevent inhalation.
You may already have a perfect 30% clay/70% sand subsoil on your
property. This is great for making traditional earthen mixes, or for
adding sawdust, woodchips and lime to make alternative mixes.
Experiment with what you have, make test bricks, and handle the
material to see how you like using it. There is no one right way to do it,
and your available, indigenous materials may dictate your final results.
Sand: The best sand is clean and sharp, with a wide range of particle
sizes (from 3 mm down to 100 micron fines.) Sand can be found near
streams, or the ocean, but beach sands are mostly round particles.
However, when mixing clay and lime this sand works well. I have
used only unwashed (salty) beach sand for my cobwood mixes with no
problem. A local quarry or aggregate seller may have "reject" sands,
available cheaply, which are great for earthen mixes.
Fiber: Straw or grass provide tensile strength. Straw has no food value
to cattle, and is considered a waste material. It should be dry, and
chopped to about 4"-8" long. Grasses such as dried lawn clippings can
be used. Remove seed heads or flowers and pods if possible, especially
when they will be used in finish plasters. Straw can be finely screened,
or animal hair, such as goat hair, can be used. The many interspersed
fibers give a flexible strength, reducing cracks and preventing large
fissures, or failure due to lateral movement.
Lime mixed with sand at 1:3 has been used for centuries as a mortar
and plaster. It hardens back into limestone by reabsorbing carbon
dioxide from the air. It is considered the best binder in the world, and is
very forgiving to work with. Lime does set up much slower than
cement, but it is binding on a molecular level with clay and sand to
form a durable, vapor permeable material.
Cob is a Welsh method using clay, sand and long chopped straw to
form and build walls. Sometimes cob is called monolithic adobe
because it is one mass, not individual bricks. Cob can be constructed
anywhere where there is adequate clay in the soil/sand ratio, preferably
30%. Digging out the footprint of the house will usually provide
enough material to build the walls. People use bales of waste straw in
making cob, and roof ridge beams are often snow-warped trees, or
scrap trees unusable for lumber.
Earthbags are long sacks filled with poor soils, and layered with barbed
wire to bind them together. They can be covered over with an earthen
plaster, and many designs incorporate a below grade floor. Misprinted
rice bags are bought from manufacturers, and a shovel and coffee can
are used for filling the sacks. Construction training is needed on this
method to ensure safe building, however.
Rammed earth became popular in the US in the 1920s when the federal
government provided information to farmers on building fire-proof
structures. A poor economy and few roads to transport lumber to rural
areas made this a good solution. Harvested subsoil is stabilized with a
small percentage of cement or lime, placed between a formwork of
boards and tamped firmly. Often the wood forms can be used later for
roof and floor construction. Manual and pneumatic tampers are
employed, and several workers are needed to be efficient. Finished
walls are protected by wide overhang roofs, or plastered with earth or
lime. Rammed earth, and all earthen buildings, moderate temperature,
are sound-proof, fire-proof, and insect resistant.
Papercrete and paper adobe are also becoming popular with alternative
builders. Papercrete is simply shredded paper, sand and cement mixed
in an industrial type blender. Paper adobe uses only shredded paper
and clay to make a heavier material for bricks, blocks and plasters.
Once mixed this fibrous material can be poured between wall
slipforms, or made into any size block, and left to dry in the sun like
adobe. But it is much lighter when dry; insect and fire resistant, highly
insulative, and mortars easily with papercrete mortar.
Papercrete can look crude when unfinished, but when plastered over
with a lime, earth, or even papercrete plaster it looks just like a regular
house. (A new book, All About Papercrete, details how to build with
this method, and other mixtures described here. $25+$4 shipping. See
pg. 43 for contact information.)
Using other fibers
Sawdust is already chopped and ready to use, and weeds, straw and
hemp are shredded and mixed in with clay or cement mixes to make
very sturdy walls.
Names for these mixes are arbitrary, of course, and only aid in
confirming which mix was used for which project. I use locally dug up
clay, bagged hydrated lime, and free local sawdust to make cobwood.
Clay and lime together can make a strong stabilized material, or harden
to a natural cement also known as Roman cement, an excellent eco-
friendly binder, and it's practically free. Cobwood and cobweed are
similar-only the substitution of dried, chopped weeds for sawdust
differs them.
Woodchip and clay mixtures to make wall infill for timberframe houses
have been used in Germany for centuries, and are popular again, and
sawdust, sand and cement have been used in Australia for decades.
These walls are tamped like rammed earth, and once dry are solid,
soundproof, and moderate temperature swings well.
The three primary ingredients of cobwood are mixed while wet, and all
are measured by volume. A simple formula is 9-3-2-1. Wetted, aged
sawdust (soaked overnight, then drained for a few hours), clay slurry,
(thick as sour cream), lime putty (also like sour cream), and sand. Dry
chopped grasses are added last before building. This pliant material can
sit overnight, or for a day or so; is like a wet cob, and can be poured,
hand applied, or thrown, "harled" as the Scots do with exterior renders.
(Wear vinyl gloves.)
Thick cobwood can be poured between walls of wire mesh. Mesh can
also be used as an armature to make a sculpture or as a form to build
lawn borders or to frame raised garden beds. There are many possible
uses for this material. I am not attempting to use cobwood for load
bearing walls, or for critical structural areas, and I am not a construction
engineer or architect. However, these natural materials have been used
since the beginning of man's (and woman's) shelter building attempts,
and are easy to play with for anyone interested in exploring alternative
ideas.
Working dry
Agstone maker John Stahl uses dry chopped weeds, shrubs, branches
and donated hemp stalks as his filler material. Industrial hemp stalks,
available in Canada and France, and weeds (available everywhere)
make a great free filler. Dry brush, shrubs, teasel, yellow dock, even
pine needles can be finely chopped and used. John Stahl has tossed
newspapers and magazines into a wood chipper/shredder and used it
along with weeds to make agstone.
John uses Portland cement in his mixes, with a durable recipe being 10
-4-3-2. Ten parts dry chopped hemp, weeds, straw; 4 parts dry lime
hydrate; 3 parts sand, 2 parts Portland cement. He uses a wheelbarrow
and adds ingredients by shovel, adding enough water to moisten, and
hoeing the mix into a thick mass. While the cement isn't being mixed
according to package directions, I can't argue with his success. John's
outdoor steps have been in daily use for over two years with no signs
of breakdown. Each step is a different recipe, some with gypsum
added, and one with no cement. The steps were poured into place,
troweled smooth and left to cure. A limewash is coated on them once a
year. John has also used formworks to make compost bins, a poured
shed floor, and is now constructing walls for a small building.
Endurance
Traditional cob will also perform well, and saves adding lime or
sawdust to the mix. If you can locate good soil, or mix sand and clay
together for a respectable cob mix you will have a totally free building
material. Lime, cement, or purchased sand does add to the overall cost,
but compared to other building methods (and the tools and equipment
needed), building with these free and easy-to-use alternative materials
is fun, creative and practical.