March 2nd 2022
Firstly, welcome all!
Thank you for coming on this journey with us. Hand building a house is a huge project, depite the fact it's a small cottage. We're lucky to have the support and help that we do, and we are inordinately lucky to have this opportunity.
Yesterday was our first day physically making and building, and not just collecting materials! We're so, so excited to be working on our project, as well as to be sharing it with you!
So day one: 108 mud bricks. Which is a great effort, considering we were learning as we went!
There were 5 of us today, but usually there will be 3-4. Thanks to Don for helping out~ Honestly, based on our previous conversations, I expected to maybe make 60 while we were still learning. Apparently we're likely to average about 150 a day.
We started at 6:30am, and finished around 8:30am, and I think we'll usually be doing about 4 hours a day?
We will be uploading a video that will highlight the process a bit more, but for the sake of explanation:
Step one: Make the mud pit!
We did this the day before, to give time for the water to soak into the mud. Australia has had one of the hottest summers on records, so it's all quite dry. And even if it weren't, mud dries and hardens very quickly.
So we got out the tractor and dug a pit, stuck a hose in, threw in some hay, and mixed it. Which we have some fun footage of, I think? I'll have to review that...
Step two: Prepare your equipment
The bricks need a flat surface to cure on - we want them as uniform as possible. So we lay out a number of boards - some laminate, some chipboard. They type doesn't matter too much as we cover them in a plastic sheeting so that they don't vacuum adhere to the boards.
Further on the subject of uniformity, we have moulds that we put the mud into.
Spades, to move the mud.
Mudulators, to tamp the mud down (which I realised you could do after I'd already used my bare knuckles and scratched them all up...), as well as to level the surface. That's what they're actually for...
Hose, to wet the moulds and mudulators.
Step three: make bricks!
Get a bucket full of mud with the tractor, and then get ready!
There are a couple of different jobs. Shoveler, who throws the mud into the moulds. Mudulators, who use the mudulator to compress the corners of the bricks (to ensure as good a coverage as possible), and flatten out the brick surface, before removing the mould, and runners, who grab the mould and mudulator (implement, not person), and wet them.
Once you get into a rhythm, it's pretty straightforwards! Obviously quite labour intensive, but hey. That's building!
The next part of our day was so exciting. We chose our front door posts and lintel!
So, as stated on our homepage, we're makng this all on Cam's family farm, and his dad (Andrew) and step-mum (Gina) already have a lot of materials collected! Some for their own house, and some for the cottage build. Some just because it's a family farm (Chittering Acres) and people have been collecting and storing things for years.
Some of those things are gorgeously long, straight ex-power poles. Which, to be clear, are not rated for building - liability reasons or something. Despite the fact they're very strong jarrah wood.
So naturally, we're using those. As you can see from a single cut, the grain and colour is stunning - the red-pink of the wood is one of my absolute favourites.
So, we cut the poles and took them over the the sawmill. That Andrew made. Because this family that I'm joining is absurdly resourceful.
After sawing the tops off, and, for the posts, notching an area for the door sliders to sit, it was a matter of taking the lintel to the planar.
And then planing it. Which, well. It's a 4 metre long piece of uneven jarrah. So it was... a process. But it looks fantastic!
We cut up an extra bit (that you can see in the back of the ute trailer there), and planed that, too. We're thinking to use it maybe for window framed or inset shelving in the walls, but it turned out to be very useful when we were trying to figure out if we wanted to oil or wax the wood.
The thing is, jarrah (and other wood) oxidises quite quickly, especially when exposed to sunlight, so we wanted to get it finished as quickly as we could. But... we had neither enough oil or wax, and I was fast running out of energy to make and 8pm shopping trip in the hopes the open shops would have our desired product.
Our preference of our two products was Feast Watson's Carnauba Wax as it didn't darken the wood too much, so we still got a lot of the pink, as well as the light striations in the wood. But I was fast running out of energy and we couldn't oil enough. So we went to bed.
And this morning, Cam went to the city to go shopping. And no shops have the 500g tub in stock. Sure they can order it, but that leaves us empty handed and the wood is sitting there greying.
We already expected to have to sand it, but we're now mentally prepared for more. He's acquired a different product on a friend's request. Given that her father's a carpenter, I'm sure it will be fine. And when he comes home with it, we'll test it out and get started on the sanding, planing and finishing process.
Maybe. It's 5pm, and he left at 10:30am. The process will take probably at least 4 hours, and we're up early to start mud bricks again tomorrow.
Today was a rest day - it was raining, so we weren't going to make bricks. We don't want them to get too damp, and there's no point working in the rain. As it is, we need to cover the curing mud bricks, so that they don't become mud blobs.
I'm sure there are some curious out there: doesn't mud dissolve? What happens when it does rain?
Well. There are many things we do to ensure our house doesn't melt around us!
We have a rock wall base, a large overhang on our roof, and we coat the bricks in oil when they're installed. That leaves us with an extremely sturfy and insulated house, and we don't have to worry about our walls dissolving.
Again, welcome everyone, and thanks for reading this far. I'll figure out a way you can leave any questions in a way that you don't have to login (dad), because I'm super new to website designing, but for now, this is Nina of Hexbot, signing off!