Hello
I'm starting to work up ideas and plans for an outbuilding in our garden (in northern England, UK). I thought I'd discuss the ideas here to help me shape the way it develops. I'm at the very start of this, and I'm looking for advice & ideas. I have no previous experience of working papercrete or earthcrete.
The building will probably be 3m deep x 2.5m tall x 4.5m long. It must look reasonably appealing to the eye. It'll be a single room, single door, single window, roof design yet to be decided on.
I'm thinking of putting a root cellar inside for storing wine and preserved foods and root vegetables. The cellar will probably be 1.2m deep x 1.2 m wide, length to be decided. The excavated cellar will provide a volume of earth to be used in constructing the building.
The outside of the building needs to be water resistant (northern England gets lots of rain!). I want to keep the inside as cool and dry as possible (for the storage of wine & food), so need to insulate and ventilate well. Any designs that help help achieve this will make my life easier.
As well as food & wine storage, the outbuilding will provide storage for the usual stuff: bikes, tools, kids toys etc... It'll probably also have a worktop area.
I can get a decent amount of shredded paper from the office I work in (mostly standard printer paper)
I've got a few ideas at the moment, some more plausible than others. I'd like someone with experience to say "that wont work…" or "try this idea…"
My initial idea is to use a mix of earth, shredded paper and cement, with water to moisten prior to filling sand-bags with the mix. To create an earthcrete/ paper wall. I'm unsure about the proportions of earth/ shredded paper/ cement. In this situation, would the paper need pulping prior to adding to the earthcrete or could I add it as shred?
I'm unsure if the volume of earth from my root cellar will provide enough material to construct a 2.5m wall (that depends on the proportion of earth to paper, and the width of the wall), so I'm thinking of a lower wall constructed of earth/papercrete with an upper wall of timber frame and cladding. The roof would thus sit on the timber frame, which in turn would sit on the sandbag wall. Is this a plausible construction technique?
Another idea I had was to create blocks from the earth/ shredded paper/ cement, possibly with a hollow centre to make the materials go further and to help with insulation. Any comments? Again, I'm particularly interesting in knowing if the paper would need pulping first, or if shred would work. I'm also interested in knowing how quickly I could remove the blocks from a mould. The chances are, I'd be making the moulds myself, so I would have very few of them, therefore to get a decent number of blocks, they'd need to go through the mould quickly. I'm trying to figure out ways of doing this using pressure to create a harder block faster with less cement (bottle jack press?)
Yet another idea is to have load bearing timbers to the ground with infill of earth/paper/ cement. I've been thinking about this a bit, but cant figure it out…any ideas?
A final thought I had was to construct flat panels "ex-situ" from shredded paper and cement, probably without the addition of earth. The panels would be screwed or bolted to load bearing timbers, then rendered with an earthcrete render. Has anyone done similar?
If you're still reading, thanks!
Probably more thoughts and questions to come…
cheers,
James
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