Rethink Your Life! Finance, health, lifestyle, environment, philosophy |
The Work of Art and The Art of Work Kiko Denzer on Art |
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[Cob] soil cement foundationfrancine fran2000a1 at yahoo.comFri Jun 3 10:28:02 CDT 2005
I finally understand what you said in another post about working slowly and by yourself. My brother in law showed up the other day while I was digging. After watching for a minute I guess he felt sorry for me and grabbed a pick and dug in the trench for quite some distance. I do appreciate his help he is very strong and can swing the pick much deeper than me (I am really slow). When he finished he was tired and left me with the digging lots of loosened soil. I could not remove all the dirt that he dug up. Usually I work at digging and then remove that portion and go back to digging. That was keeping the trench clean, and I had dug it so that it would drain some in case of rain. I went to bed exhausted and worried about rain. The rain came in torrents, and now I am the proud owner of a moat full of mud and water that will take days to dry out. I tried to clean the trench out yesterday, but just made a bigger mess. The sides are too soft and trying to cave in when I walk uphill. It was looking so neat before and I was proud of the trench I had dug. So in the end I am further behind than I would have been just digging by myself slowly and paying attention to the drainage of the trench. Hopefully, someone will learn from my mistake. Remove what you dig and make sure if rain is predicted the trench has enough fall. Work slowly and pay attention to every detail. I had already created a runoff trench running completely downhill at the bottom of the slope so help with drainage. So I should not have let that happen. Also I considered the bags, but don't want to worry with plastering them at this stage of building. Working alone with a fairly good size cottage I did not think I could accomplish all that plastering in time to stop the degradation of the bags from exposure to sunlight. I have lots of sand nearby and making soil cement in a wheel barrow won't be much more labor intensive I hope. I can get the brother in law back to construct the forms. I do appreciate him a lot. Also my mother (77 yrs old) helps me too, she has done concrete work in the past. She's much tougher than I am! <snipped> --- JUDITH WILLIAMS <williams_judith at hotmail.com> wrote: > Sounds like we are at about the same stage of > construction. Ordinarily I > would be frustrated at the slow progress (of digging) but > in this case I > really appreciate the time to consider all the options as > I work. Here is > what I have almost certainly settled on for the stem wall > over the rubble > trench foundation. I will go with earthbags filled with a > mixture of soil, > large pumice, and lime. This eliminates the need for any > forms and is > something I can do without assistance. The only concern > is that the filled > bags will be too heavy to handle but I'm sure I could get > innovative about > that. God Bless America Francine __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com
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