Ready, set, Roof!

Alrighty, all set to put the ceiling on this section, Noble's just gotta chop up the 2" by 8" boards in the shape of the sun and we'll plop down the plywood and--poof a floor! Noble wouldn't say "Poof", but I'm not doing that part, so, for me; Poof!

Papercrete and recycled bottle arch DONE, kinda

THERE IT IS!! the big arch! Next we fill in the sides to get the whole 15' by 15' area level and we put on the ceiling! Which will also be the floor to our third floor bedroom.
We bought our tickets back to Costa Rica arriving on the 30 of May. So, we'll see what we can get done for this season, two more weeks.
Plus, it's getting hot here, over 100 F some days. Time to go back to the tropics.

Main arch coming up on Papercrete house in Marathon

Ooo, I've lost track of the days and the hours, but I have it all written down, so I'll go back and put in all the details day by day for the record once we catch up after our trip to visit the family in Fargo.
This photo is of the main arch coming up between what will be the living/dining room and the bathroom/office space. Those are liquor bottles, beer bottles and Topo Chico (mineral water from Mexico) bottles donated by our friend Matt. --if you have cool liquor bottles, send us a note--Mare in ND is going to save the Jagermeistier bottles from her bar (the Box) and them ship down--don't know if that's exactly sustainable devleopment, but they'll be Gorgeous.

25 days on the papercrete place

A couple of photos of my homemade glass bloc--first is the view of my production site from the top of the stairs--it is very organized-really, then some of the blocks. The shot I was taking every day isn't changing so much cuz we're just using a lot of mud to go up the stairway in the back--there a photo of one of the nichos in that stiarway which we're using as hand holds up the stiars--and we're leveling the roof/floor still.

Typical Day making our papercrete house in Marathon Texas.

A couple fotos of a typical day...

First, here is Noble making the papercrete mortar, takes about an hour. Then...










We move the mortar and bricks from the ground up to our second floor construction...













Here's Noble using winch, not wench, to haul the materials up to the second floor. And Alaine moving the "mud" up on the second floor.
















Then, here we are happily using the mud (mortar.) we get about 4 wheel barrow-fulls out of each mixer full of mortar. It takes about an hour to use each wheel barrow if we're moving at a good speed, but putting in the glass blocks up on the arches we move slow and can work up to 10 hours a day (20 person hours).

And then the most important part of our typical day is the beer on the roof at the end of the day as we celebrate what we got done and plan for the next day.

Day 22 or so

OOO Noble is getting my home-made-glass brick up over the arches.
No time to write more, too much going on.

Day 21--views of the bathroom

Here's the view from the top of the stairs--looking into the bathroom and a view from the bathroom out the norht window. We're working on getting all of the walls up to 10 feet so we can put on the ceiling, hopefully before we go up to ND to visit the family on May 5.

20th Day, making more papercrete bricks

We decided we're gonna need more than 240 more papercrete bricks this season, so we spent another day humping mud. Much prettier brick this time. We made a big mess of some of them last time, buet they'll still work.

19th Day building up the papercrete stairway in the back

We're getting somewhere...

Day 17 and 18--papercrete brick making

We've almost used all of our bricks, so we had to spend a day hauling seven bales of recycled paper, eight bags of recycled styrofoam, 14 five gallon buckets of sand, perlight, pozzlan clay, and seven 100 pound bags of cement and tossing them up into Clyde's cement mixer and then making 240 bricks in the hot hot sun. Hot tubing in the afternoon with Mojitos helped the muscles recover.

Day 16 papercrete joint with triple arch!

Missed a couple of days, so I'll post a bunch of photos of the progress.
Check out that triple arch!