Part 3: Arches

Probably the most fun aspect of using adobe is building arches. These make great door and window openings. And they the surprisingly strong and can bear a lot of weight. First, build a wooden form and support it at the level you want to start the arch. Then as you build arch the form, use a string attached to the center point to keep track of each brick's alignment.

You can also use stuffed bags to build a form.

In the case of our largest arch, that worked just fine!

Testing them out once they are dry is so much fun!

Part 2: Making bricks and Walls

Welcome to the mudpit! The great thing about adobe bricks is that it's really easy to make the mix. You can use the clay in just about any hole you dig on the property and since we will be using a form to make the bricks and letting them dry in the sun, we don't need to worry about too much moisture in the mix. Thus, the pit becomes a creamy slurry and only requires simple walking around in it to mix well. This is also the same way we mix the mortar! For the brick mixture however, it is good to add a fiber component if you have one available. Adding fiber such as straw will increase the strength of the bricks and also make them more light weight. We added rice husks once we could get them.

Each brick will be 4 x 8 x 16 inches, so that we can use them in a variety of different positions. Packing the mud into forms...

Staring to lay the courses...

And probably the hardest part of it all... getting the bricks from the brickyard to the building site! We make it a group effort and have about 30 minutes of passing brickis on a 'brick line' each day.

The building takes shape!

Adobe Home for Peggy & Jo -- Part 1: Foundation

Pouring your own foundation isn't as hard as it might seem. Here we created our foundation in less than a week. First we cleared the site and leveled the footprint area. Then we tamped the earth solid using garden hoes and a big log with handles attached to it.


Then we marked out the wall's locations using a peg with a rope attached for the circular portion of the house and the pythagorean theorem (a^2 + b^2 = c^2) for the extensions. We set up battens with string to mark the edges of the walls and then excavated a trench 15cm deep for the footings. (No need to worry about frost-heave here!)

In Thailand, plywood is a precious commodity, so we built our forms for the foundation stemwall using old adobe bricks lined with feedbags. What's great is that they support themselves so no hardware is required and they can be reused for building with later.

Then came the not-so-fun part, mixing concrete, but it can be fun if you have a lot of people and don't have too much to do of it. We set up a bucket brigade to supply the right ratio of sand and gravel that we would add to the cement. Onward!

Once the concrete was thoroughly mixed, we poured it into the forms. The next day, we removed the bricks and two days later we'd be building walls.

Natural Building Apprenticeship at Pun Pun Farm Thailand

Welcome to Northern Thailand! Here now, I am staying put for a couple of months to learn about organic farming and earthen adobe building. So far the place has been simply wonderful and new experiences have been walking into my life in all sorts of ways.

I am living in a simple bamboo hut with three very large spiders. This took a while to be comfortable with, but I now see them as my protectors from all the other bugs. My daily schedule starts with yoga every morning at 7am. It is a very mindful practice and a great way to wake my body and set an intention for the day. Then we have breakfast around 8am. For me this consists of fresh papaya and bananas and homemade soymilk with barley and brown sugar. We have two work sessions throughout the day, 9am-12noon, lunch, and 1:30-4:30pm, these are dedicated to gardening and building. We each have our own garden beds and will be learning about seed saving once they are grown. The building project is a two story house for Peggy and Jo, the founders of Pun Pun. It’s a really beautiful design including a main circular form and rectangular extensions of from that. We will doing all aspects of the project with few resources, so there is a lot too learn, even for the experienced builders like myself. Once a week we have an Appropriate Technology Practicum, where we’ve been split into different group to build projects around the farm including rainwater catchment, UV water filtration, solar hot water production and testing the effects of Bio-char on garden beds. An amazing amount of information and practical application! We have a bit of free time before dinner where we can go swimming in the village reservoir (twenty minute walk through the village Mai Jo) or grab a pineapple coconut shake at the You Sabai Cafe on the neighboring property. You Sabai is a beautiful, peaceful place to read, contemplate, or meet with friends with a spectacular view of the surrounding mountains and daily sunset. Lunch and dinner are always healthy and delicious, we usually have brown rice with a soup full of organic vegetables or sticky rice with a spicy thai sauce and raw vegetables to mix with it. This is by far the healthiest eating I’ll have ever had for a prolonged period of time. It feels great! The evenings we usually have free, but on Monday nights we watch movies, mostly documentaries of current global concerns (my favorite!) and on Tuesdays we have a discussion group on globalization or on food production. We have lots of reading to do in preparation for these discussions, but so far I have learned a lot from them. I had no idea this place was going to be so academic. Other evenings we have been blessed with festivals in the local community and parties for birthdays of the folks in our group. There is nothing better than a chocolate cake when you haven’t had any sweets for a week.





Most of what I am learning here is actually about living simply and finding inner peace, which I am grateful to be able to focus on at this point in my life. I’ll try to keep this blog focused on the natural building aspects of what we are doing, but if you’d like to see more about the other things going on at Pun Pun, I’ll be starting a blog for that too. Stay tuned. Enjoy the photos!

2009 Natural Building Colloquium

This year’s natural building colloquium was loads of fun! There was a great turn out of the full spectrum of builders from novice to very experienced and many who were leaders in activism and policy reform.

sky island

The site for this year's colloquium was Orella Ranch, a spectacular hilltop dropping off steeply into the Pacific Coast just north of Santa Barbara. Normally rented as a place for weddings, the facilities included one cob structure, a stage made from old wine barrels, a stone bar with concrete counter serving area, great camping and a prized lawn which we found many uses for. Just before the event we also built several bamboo structures to facilitate our presentation areas, bamboo showers, and several portable orchard toilets. ‘Sky Island’ as it became known, was an amazing place for our gathering of natural builders.

The hosts were also avid natural builders and environmentally concerned folks. And the thing that bothered them most about their business was that they always had to rent chemical port-a-potties for the weddings they would host. Naturally, with 70+ natural builders, we were able to conceive of a beautiful and functional way to deal with this problem. A Timberframe with six stalls was built by the owner and a ‘Watson Wick’ was built by Tom Watson himself to deal with 500 flushes per day. Then we were ready to have some fun, since each stall wall provided an opportunity to test a different wall system! These included various types of wattle and daub, light clay-straw, cob-mesh and more. The exterior walls were built using woven split bamboo and then plastering either side of the framework. In front of the structure we built a beautiful Manzanita privacy screen and hand washing area. I particularly enjoyed the end walls, because I got to try doing stained glass in a cob wall with out using lead—a technique I’ve been wanting to try for a while. I used cob rolled into tiny sausages to set each piece of glass and then pressed the mud around the edges of each piece. They turned out really good and I can only imagine where my new found art form will grow from here.

The most significant aspect of week however was not the building project, but the relationships and networking between the builders. I really started to feel my place in the community and how much each of our presences are needed in the movement. The support system that developed from this week alone is sure to carry me into the future and the projects of 2009 now feel totally do-able. Thank you all—you know who you are.