As well as looking amazing they have great properties - helping to regulate temperature and humidity.
It's the only bit of the house we're building ourselves. It's a fairly straightforwards process and certainly not one that a builder would know anything about so we've done all the homework and prep ourselves with guidance from our Rammed Earth Wall project manager Michael Thompson.
There's not many experts on rammed earth around so it was great when we found Michael a year or so ago. He's built a very smart looking shed in his garden from rammed earth, he runs earth building courses and has been abroad working on various projects. A carpenter by trade he's got a great can-do attitude and has been really positive about getting our wall built.
Our wall is planned as a central feature of the house. It's 2.7m wide, 0.5m deep and 5.2m tall ... so pretty big! Michael has made the shuttering (formers) and dropped some of it at Girton on Saturday. The rest will arrive Wednesday when work begins in ernest.
Nick has also been working hard getting things ready. Through July and August he sourced earth, built a seiving machine and has now sieved something like 20 tonnes of earth!! We have a collection of sample blocks dotted around at Girton and Stanley Road and are really pleased with the soil mix and colour - the latest test block looks gorgeous :-)
Engineering of the highest order ...
Only 15 tonnes to go!
The first sample block in the making:
You can check out the machine in action here. Complete with grasshopper embelishment in honour of the Corpus Christi clock: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdXSXWu3p6k
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