To practice our earthen brick-laying and plastering technique, we built a well-house. Our rock foundation, about 5 x 7 feet on the inside, rests on top of a concrete foundation that we dug by hand.
The first layer of earthen block is always the hardest to lay, because you have to line up and level each block. It’s not so easy to do when your foundation was made by amateur stone masons. That would be me, my nephew Bobby, my daughter Eva, and her friend, Alex.
We prevailed in the end, and built the walls up to the point where we wanted an arch-shaped opening. The arch form is two plywood semicircles. Charles led the arch construction. The crew was reluctant to put their faces in the photo, so their t-shirts immortalized here in the picture of the finished arch.
Shaping and then laying blocks around the arch was a challenge. But again we prevailed. We put up the first of several plaster layers. Next week my cousin Jerry will pour a bond-beam (reinforced concrete) on top of the walls, and then he’ll build the well-house a roof.
As all this was going on, welding guys were putting up our house roof. The frame made it feel so much more like a house. A short week later, the roof was finished. It was Jerry’s idea to build the roof first, so we could work in the shade and so our earthen walls would be protected from rain.
We moved in as soon as it was done—you know, our water jug, our lawn-chairs, and the hundreds of bricks we made earlier in the week. Re-stacking the many 40-pound bricks wore us out in a hurry.
Our big moment came last Friday afternoon, when we laid the first earthen block on the house. Minutes later, the new roof came in handy during a downpour that lasted, oh, about four minutes. My Dad and our dog, Firewheel, enjoyed dry seating as the rain dripped from the roof .
