The project sounds simple. A 6.5 by 6.5 foot workshop made with natural materials. We were sure it would be completed by now. Yet, here I am, plugging away on this bottle wall.
I’m not here to complain. I am so fortunate to be able to live on a part time wage and spend most afternoons building my future homestead. Rather, I want to share about the realities of a DIY build, namely that everything takes much, much, much longer than expected.
Some days the work moves along quickly. We raise a wall of cob in a single afternoon. And then there are days where I will spend hours and hours on a particularly detailed spot.
Such is the case in these pictures. The frame of this little toolshed is wooden and the walls are made of an earthen mixture called cob. Instead of windows, however, we chose to use recycled bottles in a variety of pretty colors on three out of the four walls. The wall that receives the most sunshine (which is the northern wall here in the southern hemisphere) has an full length feature wall with blue and clear bottles.
The main bottle wall with lots of plastering left to do ~ image by author.
It looks so beautiful, but we had absolutely no idea how many weeks of afternoon work sessions this would take.
My partner and I planned this wall for practical reasons and for the beauty of it, too. It will be quite a while before we will have electricity on our land. In the meantime, we need a sheltered place to store tools and weather-sensitive building supplies. Until the solar panel system is up and running, we need to be able to see inside the earthen toolshed, and we chose to use the sunlight that is so abundant here in central Argentina.
Before I go on about the bottle wall, I think I should explain why we have chosen this unconventional method of building with mud instead of the plethora of modern building materials available in 2024.
It might sound strange to build walls with a mixture of straw, clay, and sand, but it is actually one of the oldest and longest lasting building techniques of all time. Still to this day, there are earthen structures created hundreds of years ago dotting this planet. Homes made with earthen walls are thermic which means they are less susceptible to temperature extremes of winter and summer.
And also — possibly most importantly in our case — building with earth is very cheap. Earth is, after all, everywhere. The sand we can gather by the bucket from the creek, and straw can be purchased very cheaply.
After the big cost of buying our acre, my partner and I didn’t have much left over with which to build. We had also been dreaming of sculpting our own home since the day we met nearly nine years ago. Between then and now, we have helped out in dozens of different builds across Latin America. This is the first time we are going it alone.
We have the skills, we have the materials, we have the time, and now it is all put to the test. A variety of things haven’t gone as planned and after months and months of working on a project that was meant to be quick, we are learning that the most important part of a DIY build is perseverance.