On 9/2/07, slurryguy <slurryguy@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> I've enjoyed reading about you and your mother's exploits. Great
> work. Magnificent location. The house seems to blend well with that
> site.
>
> I've had several questions about that house for a while.
>
> What is the foundation?
We had a backhoe out and a cement truck and did a poured foundation.
We ended up digging it too deep, so we did a mix of cement and dirt at
the bottom layer to fill in the hole we dug, then we poured cement on
top of that. We were going to build strawbale, so it's wider than we
needed, so we had to adjust for that.
> What papercrete recipe(s) did you use for blocks?
Our standard mix is 200lbs of paper, one 80 lbs bag of portland
cement, 80 lbs of fly ash, one 5 gallon bucket of sand from on site,
one 5 gallon bucket of on site clay and enough water to fill up the
500 gallon tank to about 10 inches below the top. I guess it works out
to about 200 to 300 gallons of water per mix. We've got a really big
nice creek we pump the water out of. We threw in a few pounds of lye
to keep any moldy newspapers from causing the blocks to mold.
We started out with telephone books as the paper, but the binding was
a pain in the ass. So we moved to using straight newspaper, we don't
pre-soak it like we had to do with phone books or magazines. Just
throw in the paper. We do one round of mixing with just the paper and
the water, then we add all of the other ingredients.
> What recipe did you use for block mortar?
For the mortar we double the cement / fly ash amount and use that as
the mortar.
> Did you use any reinforcement in the walls? (rebar, wood, bamboo,
> etc)
We used a combination of things. We used all of the above. In places
where we were going to put windows, we used wood and bamboo. Other
places where we were sure there wasn't going to be a window, we used
reused rebar. All of the walls were built up, then we chainsawed out
the windows.
> What is your exterior stucco? (recipe?)
> What is your interor plaster? (recipe?)
Those were both done this year, and I haven't been up there, so i'll
have to ask my mom what recipe she used. It's an earthen plaster
> The pictures look like you used fiberglass for roof insulation, is
> this correct?
Yeah, built the roof first, out of wood, and used beams and posts from
mostly wood milled on site from trees on the property. We did have to
get a few beams from offsite when we needed it to be more straight.
We thought about doing alternative insulation in the roof, and wanted
to do something like that. But this project has been dragging on for 4
years now and we are ready to be done with it.
> I like your mondo mixer. Yowzers! How big are your forms to hold
> that much slurry in one shot?
We've got ground cloths down and then we built forms that are about 12
feet long, a foot wide. the blocks end up being about 1 foot by 2 feet
by 6 inches deep. We just drive the truck along and we usually can
fill two or three of the 12 forms in one load.
I think for the 1200sq ft house we made about 2500 blocks. They take a
few weeks to dry enough to use for building. We left a couple of them
out in the field through the winter with snow, and they were still
plenty usable in the spring.
> I could ask more questions, but I'll stop there for now.
Somebody asked where we are, it's in Trinity County, northern
california. For a while we were sketchy about telling people, but the
building department has found us, and everybody in the county it seems
has heard about that 'paper house' .
>
> Welcome to the group. Have fun!
Thanks,
evan
> --- In papercreters@yahoogroups.com, evan <anarchogeek@...> wrote:
> >
> > Hey, i just wanted to drop an email introducing myself.
> >
> > I've been doing papercrete stuff for a number of years with my mom,
> > Joyce Plath, and Shane Keller on Panilokpom, a project to build a
> 1200
> > sq ft papercrete house which is now mostly done.
> >
> > You can see photos taken of the project:
> >
> > http://flickr.com/photos/rabble/tags/papercrete/
> >
> > We experimented with forms, panels, and blocks and ended up choosing
> > to go mostly with blocks. The roof was built first using wood
> (mostly
> > milled on site), then the papercrete walls were in filled.
> >
> > We started out with a tow mixer, but that kept breaking, leaking,
> and
> > generally was difficult to use. So then we went and converted the
> > truck in to a big 500 gallon mixer....
> >
> > http://flickr.com/photos/rabble/310519693/
> >
> > That's worked pretty well for us.
> >
> > Now that the main house is done, Shane has a business making and
> > selling the blocks to other builders in Northern Califonria.
> >
> > Let's see, what else, we started out with it being ag building,
> > meaning we didn't need a permit, but eventually the inspector came
> by.
> > Instead of shutting down the project, he was pretty cool. We
> submitted
> > plans and engineering documents and he approved a construction
> permit.
> > We're not 100% sure we will be able to get a final sign off, we want
> > to us a composting toilet, and we don't want to put in the requied
> > spectic tank.
> >
> > Oh, one other thing, we had the building catch on fire. The wood
> stove
> > got too hot and the heat barrier wasn't in place behind it. It
> > smoldered for 2 days before we noticed. Eating up about a 3 foot
> > diameter hole in the wall. We just cut it out, and restacked it.
> This
> > time using more clay / sand, and put in place a heafty heat
> barrier. I
> > couldn't imagine a wood building burning for two days with out any
> > structural damage.
> >
> > -evan
> >
>
>
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