Building an adobe home in the woods of southwestern New Mexico
We have now finished installing all 52 trusses on the house! After the trusses were installed with all the necessary blocking, I began attaching the hurricane ties, which provide a secure connection between the trusses and the top plate. Our inspector had told me that we could install hurricane ties on every-other truss, so that … Continue reading Completing the Trusses
Putting up the roof trusses feels like a major milestone, as for the first time, the house finally has it's basic shape established. As of the publishing of this post, we have about 3/5ths of the trusses in place. Having figured out the rhythm of the process, the trusses go up at a good pace. … Continue reading Putting Up Roof Trusses
Earlier this week we completed the installation of our tongue and groove ceiling above the vigas. A multitude of T&G boards were involved in the installation. I believe we used 230 individual 1x6x16' boards in all. The finished ceiling presents a grid of prominent vigas supporting a backdrop of clean and orderly tongue and groove … Continue reading Tongue and Groove Ceiling
Happy 2019 to all of our intrepid readers! Thanks for following along with us in 2018 - we should have lots more interesting posts on our progress as we continue our build in the new year. We finally finished filling in with our two courses of adobes between the vigas on December 13th, 2018. … Continue reading Filling in between vigas…In winter!
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 - Stuart 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!
Vision creation adobe 