Hyperadobe? Not Anymore.

Last week we were able to finish the welding on the C purlins and we are wasting no time getting started on the next part of the roundhouse. What's up? Three to one is here. Just do it on the side? Yeah. You can hear that? Should we try two and a half? Wait. You got was two parts? Two parts to one. I like a whole number because it's just easy. We don't want to make it complicated. Yeah, I want it easy as possible. 2.362. I mean, I have a lot of education, but I just don't want to think. Hey guys, so we've been trying to figure out how to build up these walls on the roundhouse and think we have an idea. Gurudoss is here. Adobe Bricks are here. Isaiah's here. I'm back. Andrew and Tiffany are here and there's lots of kids running around. It's going to be a good day. So I'll just go heavy there to fill that in. Yeah, yeah, like that. Yeah, because it pitches down there. It's watertight. And then to make sure that the joint looks good to the outside face, what I'll do is I'll push a little bit so that I'm kind of concentrating it on its edges. I think so. All right. Oh, and then I'll need a two foot level. I mean, it's not critical. I can always bump it. Oh, there it is. It's hard to hear. Got it. Come back a little. Right about there. And then you can't put too much because it'll slide right off. But let's see if this works. And then I like to give the head joint a touch first and then rest my block down. And I'm going like I'm like holding the weight of the block. And I'm going like 80 percent of the weight, 60, 40. And then I like release. But if I just plop it down, it's just going to squish all the mud out right away. So you don't you don't want to do that. You want to like slowly set the block and then you can give it a little tap. And then I'm going to clean up this edge. And then I can either throw it into the head joint or I could throw it down ahead of me where the next bed joint is going to go. And and then before I move on too far, I'm going to gauge this. Nobody's done this. On this, like, could you just go with some of that? You could. Yeah, definitely. Just put a little bit right in there. Yeah, start with. I don't know if it mattered. No, it doesn't matter at all. I'm going to need some more. Isaiah, it's in the window. You got it for me, sir. The mix is feeling really good. Look how fast it's gone. It's only been a few minutes. Isn't that cool? I'm so glad we're not looking back. I mean, we didn't have to make the brick. Yeah, you didn't make the brick. Yeah. And store the brick and transport the brick. What's going to happen if we need like 900 brick and you have 180? We're going to do a workshop and we're going to in the summer. We're going to do a summertime workshop and it's going to take. That's going to sound miserable. Two or three days to make a thousand bricks. I could just. I mean, we can make bricks here if we need to, right? I don't think I mean, you can use this same material and just put straw on it. Yeah, that's what it is. Yeah, totally. OK. Yeah, you can make them here. I mean, it's not the fastest, but I'm also not like not hurting or concerning myself. This channel. Could probably chop out a notch right here. And I might be able to chop out a notch right here, too. Let's make sure that it's what we want. Looks like it. Cut. It's artisan. Look at that. I think that's going to work. No tape measure needed. Like a glove. It's too easy. Let's do one. One at a time. One is good. How much do you think those weigh, Gudos? 10 pounds? 15 pounds? OK, so we had a really good adobe laying session today. We learned a lot from Gudos. He still has two pallets left at Awareness Ranch, which we are going to go get and use. But based on how many we used today, we're going to need a lot more than that. So what we are going to do before he heads out is we're going to build our own adobe forms. We're going to try to do a few mixes and do some test bricks and see if we can make them here on our own. That way, he's not having to make them in Tucson and we're not having to transport them back and forth. If we can just get material delivered here and make them here, then we can kind of make them as we go. So yeah, we're going to build a brick form and we're going to make some mix and throw some straw in and see what happens. Making adobe at home, four children. Three changes of clothes and three showers. Now the little ones beat me to get in there. Well, I don't think there's enough room for me. Maybe we should take turns, like two at a time. You got me! We can spray them all week or take a shower. I'm suspicious. Something's going on here. Okay, so you just shovel this in? Yeah, I think it takes about two heaping shovels. Oh, and then it's, yeah, it's a little suction. It's a straight hole. Look at that. Those are perfect. Feels great. From this viewpoint on the camera, I can't even see them. They're so camouflaged. Wait for the next one. I'll just leave a little space for my fingers there. Corners. That's pretty much it. And then they dry. And then it's like after how, what's the time frame of flipping, turning? I mean, it's really dry right now outside and hot. You might be able to flip this tomorrow. If you come and it feels soft, maybe wait. You'd flip it up on its end? Definitely. In three days, you can definitely turn it over, yeah. You just slowly pull it until it starts slipping. It's beautiful. I don't know if I'm supposed to press it. Good morning. Today is a very big day. But before we can even get started over at the house, I've got to get my laundry hung up. It is so beautiful out right now and no rain until later. So this is the time to get it done. This is a little embarrassing, but these are the conditions of our towels. So these towels have been with us since 2017, right after we renovated the Airstream and started traveling again full time. So it's been almost 10 years that these towels have been well-loved. But thanks to today's video sponsor, Quince, for sending us new towels that not only look great, but also have no holes and dry fast. If you are not familiar with Quince, it is your one-stop shop for all things home goods. But it doesn't stop there. They have clothing, furniture, travel essentials, jewelry, and more. Quince is able to pass on huge savings to you and me because they cut out the middleman. They work with factories that use safe and ethical practices so that you can feel really good about the items that you bring into your home. These are the Turkish Waffle Terry Bath Sheets. So they have waffle design on one side, terry loops on the other side, so you get the best of both worlds. Plus, they are super fast drying, which is a requirement for any towels to make it onto our homestead. They have to dry in the sun, outside, fast. In this bundle, you get two bath sheets, the huge ones, two hand towels, and two washcloths. So now that we each have our own set, we are set for the next 10 years. I probably won't stop talking about how much I love Quince. Not only do they make long-lasting, high-quality items, they also have just been a joy to work with. Their customer service is top-notch. So thank you to Quince for continuing to sponsor our channel. If you'd like to try Quince, you can scan this QR code or visit the link in the description below to maybe get yourself some new bath towels or any home goods or all the other things that they have. Now, let's get back to the house. Good morning, friends. We've had a few people asking about the berm and swale. And so just as a PSA, we usually do our yearly berm and swale big update after monsoon. There's not really a point in doing it before monsoon because it doesn't really look any different from the last video because monsoon is really when it gets a ton of water. The rest of the time, it's just us trying to keep everything alive until monsoon comes. So while I can't give you a full tree-by-tree update, I will give you just sort of a quick update about what has been going on with it. As you can see around me, overall, it's doing really, really well. We had a nice spring with pretty moderate temperatures and little bits of rainfall. And so that really has helped things kind of perk up a little bit even before monsoon. And really, we haven't even gotten a real monsoon this year. So a couple of things we've done this year. Number one, I got a little like squeeze bottle from the dollar store and I filled it with vinegar. And I came and I squirted it into each individual emitter because some of them were clogged up. Sometimes we do have to haul in water and it's pretty hard. And so I was hoping that would like remove a lot of the calcium deposits. And it did actually. It worked for most of them. And then Adelaide and I came back and we went through the entire Burmanswell, every single tree. We like trimmed up the bottom of... I can't really see, but like basically most of these trees, everything had grown over the emitter. So we couldn't really even see what was going on. So we trimmed everything up just a little bit. If a tree was struggling, if it was smaller than it should have been, we added an extra emitter. We moved emitters further, even further out when we could. And we have switched up our irrigation pattern. So you may have seen in the past, we're using this thing called Beehive, which is a weird name for an irrigation system, but it's basically just a little battery powered thing that has an app that can connect to Wi-Fi and you can program it to do a bunch of stuff. I was poking around in the settings the other day and came across this thing called Smart Watering. And I was like, I haven't seen that before. I think it was just like an update. And so I went in there and it was this whole thing where I had to put in a ton of information, soil types and rainfall and what I was irrigating, what time of year it was, flooding potentials, and all these different things. And I put all this information in and it built me a schedule that actually looked pretty smart. I was really impressed. And the thing that was different than what we were doing, we were watering an hour every four days for these plants. And it was like, you should really water 30 minutes every two days. And as soon as I saw that, I was like, oh, it's because of our sandy soil. That way it's making sure that it doesn't go too deep. So I thought this was a really great idea. I turned the Smart Watering on and let's just say it was a little too smart for its own good. It kept doing this thing where like, if it even thought there was rain in the forecast, it would pause it. And you know, our monsoons are so unpredictable that just, it wasn't a good strategy. And then it was trying to be extra smart about how much water it thought was in our soil. Like it has any idea what water volume is in our soil. And so it would run one side longer than the other side. Anyway, I would come out, you know, and some trees would look a little crispy and I would go look at the app and I'm like, oh, it's decided that it's gonna like not run again. And the whole purpose of the Smart Watering is actually to save water. So I get it and I'm appreciative of it. But I ended up having to just like turn that off and manually program the same idea. So we're watering a little more often with a little less water. And I feel like the trees are doing really well. They got through the hottest part of the year back in the early spring and summer much better. But yeah, as you can see, I mean, you know, the grass has come back this year. We have had rain, just haven't had any like huge rain events yet. And overall the trees seem to be doing, they all look pretty healthy. We will do a full tree by tree update later in the fall after monsoon is over. So keep an eye out for that. But I just wanted to give you guys a quick update while we're working on this adobe. Good morning. Today I am not on the homestead. This morning I'm actually on a job site down here in downtown Tucson and I'm helping Guru Das and his team foster a fireplace at a sorority house. I'm always up for fun. This is gonna be something new and something fun to do. So let's do it. Just got done at the job site and we are picking up Isaiah so that we can go to Awareness Ranch, load up the truck with more adobe block. It's already three o'clock. We'll get to the ranch 3.30 ish and then probably half an hour to load, half an hour to bring Isaiah back and then go home. So it's gonna be a long day but I'm excited to have the block there to where we can continue working on building up our walls. And yeah, it's a long process and I'm just excited to be at this point where we have the product. We know what we need to do. It's just a matter of getting it done. It's just a lot of labor but we're in it. We're in it and we're doing it. So let's go load up some more block. Thank you so much. No problem. And we got those there and you can strap on those. Do I have to strap it? Oh, just strap it. So speaking of Awareness Ranch, we have definitely bought all of Guru Das' adobe bricks. We still have more to go pick up but we need to replenish his supply, okay? We need your help. There is a workshop at Awareness Ranch, September 26. We're going to be there. You should also be there. It's very affordable. You're going to get to learn how to make bricks. There's lunch provided and we're going to help Guru Das and Awareness Ranch replenish their supply of bricks. So we hope that you can come. You can go to awarenessranch.com and sign up, get all the details there. But yeah, like I said, we're going to be there. Hopefully we'll see you there too. Good morning. We've got a truck bed full of bricks. We need to get out and get stacked and put with the other ones. Not sure if we'll get to laying adobe bricks today, but we're going to go take a look at how they're doing. They've been up for like a day and a half. So I'm curious to see what's happened. You're in my way. Oh my gosh. Stepping on cats. There's a mosquito bug. It's definitely solid. Yeah. How heavy are they? They're heavier because they're still wet. They look good. Feel good? Yeah, let's check the mortar up there. So it looks like it's dried pretty well. We do have some cracks in the mortar and some parts of it are a little brittle. The mortar itself. We were trying to figure out the mix the other day. I'm going to text Guru Das and see what he thinks about this. Like the flat parts, even though they have small cracks, it's not like they're coming off. And really, we just need it to hold together until we plaster it. That's really the biggest thing. But I am a little worried about how brittle some of these like little extra pieces are, how easy they are to knock off. So it might be that we need more clay or more sand. I'm not sure yet. But yeah, we're gonna get there. Just might need to make a few adjustments. All right. I know we're pretty deep into this video, but let's back up a minute and talk about how we got to adobe bricks. Okay. So once we put those bar joists up, we knew we were going to have 32 inches that we have to continue building this wall up. The problem is it's monsoon season and most of the time it's just Jonathan and I because the kids are so busy with school and work. Right. So our initial options were more hyper adobe bags or lava cream. And so here is our thought process that we worked through. For hyper adobe, we did know we weren't going to do the full 16 inch bags. We're only going to do 12 inch because we want to leave part of that bond beam open to run utilities and stuff. Like we kind of need that because we're going to leave our bar joists exposed. It'll be our little chase. So it meant, okay, it's still a lot of material, but it's a little less material because it'd be 12 inch bags instead of 16. But anyway, we did the math and it's like a whole rumbles worth of work. I mean, it's a lot of wall. Like it's almost three feet of wall around the entire perimeter of the roundhouse. Yeah. And there's no way that like we can do that this time of year. Right. Like you said, it's too hot. Monsoons are too unpredictable and our kids are a lot busier now. They've got jobs. And so it's just the timing. Like we said, it's nice in the morning, but they're at work. And so then we try to work in the afternoon and the rain's coming and then we try to work in the late evening and everyone's like, I'm done for the day. What are you talking about? I don't want to do this. And so we kind of, we just got really overwhelmed because they're like, we can't, the two or three of us, we can't lay hyperduty bags that high up at any like decent amount of time. So the other option was LavaCrete. We love working with LavaCrete. It's really easy. We've already built the forms. Like we know how to build the bond beam forms. It's basically the same thing. We could just fill with LavaCrete. The main issue is that while we do like LavaCrete, it's definitely more expensive than dirt. It just is. Yeah. And we didn't want to spend that much money on the walls. It's also a whole lot of time building the form work. Like it's, it's, it's a lot of upfront labor. If we were lower, I think it would have been a more viable option. But I mean, the other big issue is even if you mix that material, how do you get it 10, 12, 13 feet up in the air into those forms without a bunch of just like manual labor, right? And like we talked to Paul and Gurudas about conveyor options and like that could have worked. But I think at the end of the day, it was just like, we only need 8 to 12 inches and it doesn't need to be structural. It's not holding anything up, right? And blocks are just so much more movable because that's, that's where we're at. It's like, how do we move this material? Ourselves. The most efficiently possible to keep the wear down on our bodies and to make things go quickly. And for those of you wondering about other options, like ICF block or like hemp blocks or there's all these other things that we could have bought that were pre-manufactured that we were setting in place. Those were just all too expensive. Once we really started calculating the linear foot plus the number of rows of everything that we would have to do, it talked to a bunch of people and yeah, it just, the pricing just didn't make sense for this part of the project. So we were talking to Gurudas and he's like, guys, I got a bunch of Adobe bricks. What about that? And that kind of opened up the conversation. And so that's why we're here and why we're trying this. And I think we are, what would you say? 80% on board? 75. 75% on board. And most of that has to do with our mortar mix and the soil we have available here. Our soil is too silty. Even the soil we brought in from Wilcox Rock and Sand is too silty. And so the mortar mix is a little too crumbly for what we like. Yeah. So in the future videos, we're going to be exploring different mortar mixes and possibly even different brick mixes. We'll just, we're just going to try a whole lot of different things in a short amount of time because we really need to nail this down quickly so that we can continue. We got to keep moving, guys. You want to watch videos. This is the next step of the house. Our goal by the end of this year is we want to have the floor done. We want to have the, so we want to have it covered and protected. And the truth is, once the roof goes on, any sort of worries we have about these Adobe bricks, they're not really going to be exposed, especially long-term. They'll get plastered over. They're not really going to get hit by much rain or anything like that. But we do have this, like we're laying them the worst time of year because this is monsoon, right? And so we don't want to build all these walls up and have like the rain, you know, wash them away. I don't think that's going to happen. It's not going to wash them away, but I'm worried about the amount of, what's it called? When it, when the rain. Erosion? Yes. I'm worried about the amount of erosion that we've seen in this short amount of time with the rain that we've had. So it's just a concern in the back of our minds. Once we build them up, we close them all in, it's fine. They're not going to go anywhere. They're still super solid. It's a, it's a good amount of mass. And that's the other thing too, is like we could have just like put up like a big piece of metal or wood or some sort of, you know, material to fill in that space, but then we would have to insulate it somehow. And so that creates a whole other situation. So this will still allow us to have the thermal mass that we like, and it will give us a place to put utilities. And if we need to insulate it more, we can. Anyway, that's how, that's how we arrived at Adobe Bricks in a very short amount of time. It's been a journey. Long explanation, but we felt like we needed to tell you. Yeah. Because I'm sure you're like, hold up guys, like what is happening? Like what? Yeah. So anyway, that's where we're at. This is very real time. I think we're recording this three days before this video goes out. You need to go get different clay like today. So like, anyway, things are happening. Yeah. And we're figuring things out as you're watching this. So thanks. Thanks for coming along on this journey with us. All right. Back to the video. All right, friends, we had a great time with everybody over here doing Adobe blocks the other day, but they all had to leave and go home to their own places. So we are going to keep going. We're going to try to get this one section of wall built all the way up to the bottom of the C Pro and just to give you and really us an idea of like what the heck this is going to look like. Because we've been trying to explain this whole idea of there's a big hole there. If we don't fill this wall up to the bottom of the C Pro. And so we're hoping this will help you visualize and it will help us understand exactly how much work is going to go into this, how many bricks we're going to need. We need to do a bunch of calculations and all that stuff. Yeah. So we're going to work on this and we're going to try to get it done. We finally reached the point where I can't lean over the wall up there to like clean up the joint. So Jonathan is going to raise the scaffolding. We're just going to find what works at the very top. So that we just keep it at the highest point. That way we're not moving it up and down. It'll be annoying for the first few rows just bending over so far, but it is what it is. How am I going to get this to you? So we need to do a little test and see how close we are to the bottom of the C-Purlins. Hard to tell without the C-Purlin there. So we've got a test one we're going to put up, see where we're at. Okay, guys, this is where things get really confusing. This is why our brains have been breaking for the last few months. So you can see that we've built this wall up, but it is not quite, well, it might be high enough. See, this is the tricky part, right? I don't think it is. Hold on. If we go underneath from this bar joist to this bar joist. Oh, yeah. See, because we're putting a ceiling on the bottom of these, right? So the question is, I think we should go up one more block. That way, when we come to put the eave here, eave, what's it called? Whatever it's called. That way, whatever goes here hits this. Right, so let me, here, let me, because these actually won't be connected, right? So you'll have a whole set of eaves on the outside that go like this. And so if we're going at that pitch to match the pitch, it's not going to seal very well. It is really close though. It is. I think we should go up. It might be okay. And then obviously there's going to be the panels on top. So we're thinking if we go up another brick, we still have room inside here where it won't hit the top of the R panel. But when we put the ceiling in like this, it'll give us a better seal because that's going right over the top of it right now. We could probably stop here, but I feel better about going up. It also depends on what we're putting. Like this is a half inch piece of plywood. What if we're doing like planks? It doesn't really matter because I'd feel better about having more here because either way, it'll just give a better thing to like push the ceiling too. I don't know how to explain it. Yeah, it's very, it's weird. It's like 3D chess. The thing we do have to remember though is that there will be some like electrical, like if we want lights around the outside of the building coming down from underneath that eave, we'll have to leave enough space where we can drill through and hopefully not drill through the block to get that wire to the outside. Does that make sense? Well, if you put your block up, it's only going to be another four or five inches. I don't know. I could really go either way. I mean, the less block we have to lay, the better. I know, I just feel like it's a mistake. The more like crap we have to deal with later if we don't go up a little bit higher. But here's the other issue. This one's playing really nice, right? This bar joist or this C-Purlin and this C-Purlin are not even touching this wall. But I promise you, because of the curve, there are going to be places where the C-Purlins are going to run directly into this wall. And if we come up a whole other thing, then we're going to have to be doing some crazy notching when we go to put these last C-Purlins on. Yeah, but it's easy to notch. It is easy. I mean, Gyarados did it pretty easy with that Sawzall the other day. It's fiddly one way or fiddly the other way, isn't it? Yeah. You think we should like talk through it with somebody before we make this decision? Or should we just do it? Should we just lay the block? I think we should do it. Honestly, if it was just my decision, I would just go up one more. That does definitely... It gives you a much cleaner seal bringing your ceiling in here because it means instead of hitting at the top of the corner, you would hit more like this. And obviously you would still have to do some stuff. But like... And the thing is, the inside doesn't really matter because we're going to be building up a separate piece on the inside anyway. So it's really more about the outside. So the question is... Well, you can't really use that because you're not going to have it at the right pitch unless you hit both of those, you know? I don't think you can reach both. I don't think it's not big enough to reach both. Oh, it's so close. Yeah, that's not going to work. It can't reach those and to this one, so it's not going to help you. So we just... We'd really just be eyeballing where it hits at this point. Yeah, and I don't think that's a good eyeball. Man, it's so close. I think we need to go up one more. It's only four blocks. It's not like it's going to take a long time. Yeah. Let's do it. Okay. Can you get up here and do this?