Building an adobe home in the woods of southwestern New Mexico
I arrived early to the build site on the morning of August 10th. The sun was starting to rise above the mountains in the cloudy eastern sky and all was peaceful and still. It was the quiet before a storm of intense activity to come - Stewart from Custom Steelworks was on his way in … Continue reading Vigas atop an adobe house
A few months have passed and we've been busy working. We've finished our wood bond beam, completed the geogrid strapping, and peeled all the vigas. After working almost exclusively with wood materials over the past couple months, I can honestly say that I much prefer the bygone days of working with earthen materials. At this … Continue reading The Current State of Affairs
Here's a new post in my effort to catch our intrepid readers up on some of our recent construction activities that I haven't gotten fully into in previous posts. I'll be detailing a method we employed for anchoring our bond beam to the adobe walls. Firstly, the bond beam is an essential structural element in … Continue reading Geogrid Anchoring Method: Part 1
We've done so much since my last blog post that it seems fitting to break up our activities into a few individual posts. This first post, as the title indicates, is all about vigas. Vigas are the rounded pine beams that will be a major structural and aesthetic element of the ceilings in our house. … Continue reading Viga Notes
We've been busy laying bricks, taking advantage of dry, warm days, and waiting out the cold and wet ones. Poor weather days provide opportunity for gringo block production, lintel sanding, and clay screening - so all's not lost on wintry days. Although we really couldn't have asked for a better winter season for laying adobes, … Continue reading …and the house takes shape
The year is now 2018 and the winter season is in full swing. We count ourselves lucky during this time of our adobe work, as the season has been quite mild. Daytime temperatures have been in the 50's and 60's, while overnight lows have ranged from low 20's to upper-30's. We've had two snowstorms thus … Continue reading Building Adobe Walls…In Winter!
In the spirit of Thanksgiving, it seems a fitting occasion to say a big THANK YOU to all those family members and friends who have been out to the build site in the last month or so. Whether coming just to see what we've been up to or sweating it out with us on the … Continue reading A thank you to all the helpers and visitors!
After over four months of foundation work, we were finally ready to lay our first adobes on Saturday, October 21st. The thrill of this milestone didn't fully strike me ahead of time. I had been primarily focused on making the final preparations - moving adobes up to the build site and finishing the door rough … Continue reading Laying the first adobes
Another month has passed and we finally laid our first adobes yesterday morning! It took us a little over four and a half months to get to this point, as we broke ground on the foundation on June 1st of this year, so it really felt like a huge milestone. Before I discuss laying the … Continue reading Finishing the foundation and preparing to lay the first adobes
We've been busy working since our last post! The gravel trench proved to be a time-consuming and laborious project, but hey, that's what building your own house is all about! The trench took precisely 75,340 lbs. of gravel to fill. Shovelful by shovelful we moved that entire amount from the pile to the trench. Installing … Continue reading Finishing the gravel trench and constructing the concrete forms
