Adobe and Cement Construction

Submitted by fyl on 22 April, 2008 - 08:28.
Adobe and Cement Construction

This house is being built along the Pan Am highway north of Condega. It looks like the model for "new adobe construction". The walls are adobe but with cement used for the structure. The next photo shows an adjacent house with roof rafters in place.

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Thanks for the variety of

Submitted by davesailer on 22 April, 2008 - 19:21.

Thanks for the variety of topics you keep bringing up. I've always been interested in making things myself, though most of them have been small. It seems that anyone and everyone should be able to make his own house. Several friends have.

The first set, a husband and wife, had the shell of a "traditional" house built for them then spent the next 25 years finishing the interior while living there. Yeeg. But they did pretty well.

Another, an ornery bachelor friend, scaled down his parents' house and built the whole thing himself, having only the basement excavated for him. All the rest was his work, including many tons of stone he collected for the walls. He had a pretty good passive solar design augmented by a wood-burning range, which he also cooked on. And by a 1500 gallon water tank in the basement that stored solar heat.

I read "The Art of Natural Building", one of the books on your list, and was intrigued, but they don't give too many details. It was surprising how much can be done with earth in one form or another, even to making earthquake-resistant buildings.

Just a day or two back I heard a long radio news segment on superadobe and Nader Khalili (can't remember where), but these two items I just found are relevant: "Down to Earth", by the Los Angeles Times (http://www.calearth.org/latimes2.htm) and "Superadobe / Superblock Construction System" (http://hackvan.com/pub/stig/articles/earth-architecture--sandbag-superad...)

Cool stuff (for me anyway).

-- Dave Sailer

sandbags and barbed wire . . . is way cool IMO

Submitted by webtrainer on 23 April, 2008 - 22:08.

I'm especially interested in this sort of desert type design in the coastal Rivas area, where that wind blows real dry, especially this time of year, passive wind cooling works very well.

Doors of hope fly open when doors of promise shut. -Thomas D'Arcy McGee