Update at last

Due to popular demand, here's some more photos.

The whole picture. When the sections we are currently working on are complete, we will have 40% of the walls done!

Carpet skirt, keeping the walls moist, to avoid shrinkage cracks.


The kitchen and living room.

The View through the garage doors or actually the space where the doors will be.


Kane mixing the mud.

Starting with the garage, I've done the first pour and I'm in the process of setting up the formwork for the second lift.

Going up. The formwork is almost ready for the 4th out of 5 pours.

Foundations

All the boxing in place ready to pour the foundation walls. There is about 800M of 200x25 timber.


Lots of rebar to support those heavy walls, in earthquake prone New Zealand.


The resulting foundation walls. I was stuffed after a day of removing boxing.

Building our house

I've taken 2 months off work to construct the walls of our earth house. I hope I can get it done in
that time otherwise I'm going to have to ask for more time off, which will mean a bigger mortgage!

One of the reasons I'm writing this is that there is plenty of info on earth building, but not so much on poured earth.

Our house wall are constructed of "poured earth" or "poured adobe". This is where formwork is set up and mix of earth and some cement is poured into the formwork. Poured is not quite the right word as the consistency of the mix is more like stiff porrige, so it must be tamped or vibrated to remove any voids. If the mixture was actually runny enough to pour then the shrinkage as it dries would be too much and there would be cracking.