Everyday I need to remind myself that I am living my dream.
For years I dreamed of living off-grid in a home built with my own hands. Dreaming of building a home, however, is quite different from the reality. While my mind imagined this process would be fun & easy, the hands actually doing the work are suffering quite a bit.
I am so lucky to have the opportunity to do what I always wanted to. I am so lucky to have my partner beside me, encouraging me and picking up the slack when I am too tired to go on.
I am not complaining.
I just want to be honest about how hard building one's own house really is.
Over the past couple of months I haven't been able to spend much time on this blog. I started a new job, have my homesteading chores to tend to, and the build is taking up pretty much all my free time. I started to miss Hive and so I vow to share more about all these aspects of life, starting with a building update:
My last posts here in Build-It was all about the struggles of organizing work parties with my partner, my best friend, and her kids. And to be honest not much has changed. We tried a third (and possibly final) work part two weekends ago. While the kids were so much better behaved than the first time, they simply were not interested in helping out with this new phase of building.
The first two work parties centered around filling in the walls of the house with a technique called quincha which you can learn about here:
Now that the walls are filled in we need to quickly cover up those walls with a protective barrier of earthen plaster. The night previous I made a big batch of this earthen mix. The plaster itself consists of sand, mud, horse manure, finely chopped straw, and fermented prickly pear juice.
I imagined that the kids would love this play-dough-like material and have a lot of fun sticking it to the wall. And, once again, my imagination was a but off. The kids helped out for about five minutes before going off to play with sticks in the creek. And that is totally fine! They are kids after all and kids love to play. The fact that they didn't break anything except a few pieces of bamboo is, to me, a success.
My bestie, however, was really into the work and helped us out for a couple of hours before her kids begged to go home and watch cartoons. It gave me an idea: what if we hire her to help us out a couple of mornings a week while her kids are in school?
I asked and she gladly agreed. As a single mom finding a job flexible enough to accommodate her child-care responsibilities is tough and she is pretty much survives on child-support and side hustles. And now she can add natural building to her list of sidd hustles. This is yet another benefit of natural building: there are so many aspects of the build that require little or no previous experience, just enthusiasm and a willingness to get covered in mud.
Luckily my friend has both of the needed criteria. And as you can see there is a lot of plastering left to do! So we really appreciate the extra help.
Pictures and words really aren't the most didactic way to explain the processes of natural building. Video is! And in the next couple of weeks I plan to upload a video about plastering, the exact proportions we use for the mix, and tips & tricks on how to make it stick. See you then!