A rousing "Good Morning" to all you handy Kossak home dwellers and DIYers. For those of you newly arrived to our regular gab fest, we offer support and encouragement to folks working on around home projects or repairing some problem which may have arisen to interfere with the perfect serenity of your home.
I have a couple of more photos of the adobe house project, now ready for the next operation, forming a bond beam of reinforced concrete above the walls to lock them together and provide stable bearing for the roof structure.
Share your dreams and your dismays; perhaps we can help out.
Here are the walls up to full interior height. This is the product of 7 men working 7 days. The gringo blocks in the top course of adobes will serve as attachment points for the plywood form boards that will hold an 8 inch thick concrete "bond beam". Steel rebars will give the strength.
Window and door openings are spanned by wood timbers (milled from standing dead Englemann spruce salvaged from fire and beetle killed trees), called lintels. The timbers have been worked with a broadaxe, a gouge, a torch and a grinder to give the appearance of a timber hand-hewn from a log. That long (20 feet) stick on blocks in the foreground will span the garage door opening.
The lintels will likely be stained darker.
Grab some coffee or tea, drag up a chair and visit a while. Let us know what you are working on, whether it's a pleasure or a pain. Maybe we'll have some useful advice, or just sympathy and encouragement.