Saturday, January 19, 2008

Electrics - and that girder

In most houses you get a series circuit of electricity conduits around you as you stand or sit in a room, meaning you are constantly contained within an electromagnetic field - not the healthiest way to live. Our cob floor is yet to go in, so our maze of conduits is mostly going below our feet, and where not it's going straight up and down the walls between floors, avoiding much of the electromagnetic field effect.
At last - the engineering feat of the girder is safely positioned above the garage entrance so we can cob the final upstairs wall (or rather, mostly, adobe brick it).
Recent publications including shots of the house include Men's Health Living (November issue) and Home magazine (Jan 2008 issue).

Roof insulation

First insulating layer is cardboard, this is used pretty widely for insulation but we're using flat boxes as it's also to cover gaps in the timber so that no clay dust comes through from the next layer.
Next layer is called "leichtlehm" - presumably a German invention, it means 'light-clay'. Made with as much straw as can soak up a sand/clay mix and water. You could do this barefoot (I did!) but it's quite prickly.
Then comes the complicated bit - getting it up two stories in a convoy of buckets and pulleys...
Finally it gets put in place, about 10cm thick in the end after much stamping down. As with the cardboard, we're just covering the area over the internal part of the house.