“How to choose your exterior plaster?
1) make it breathable — this refers to the ability of a material to allow humidity back-and-forth through the surface (it does not mean there is literally air flow through the material).
Plasters
Basalt Stucco Substrate?
Interesting letter from one of our readers. Be sure to read Kelly’s response below where he proposes a similar method to create an “instant, completely solid housing envelope”.
The Art and Science of Natural Plaster
“We just launched “The Art and Science of Natural Plaster” on Kickstarter. For the last months, Chris Magwood and I have been pouring our lives into this educational documentary. We want to help more people to know about Natural Plaster and all it’s beneficial effects on us and the environment. We want to empower you with a real practical how-to video.
The Oldest Known Strawbale House in Europe
The ”Maison Feuillette” was built in 1921 by Feuillette, an engineer who was looking for solutions to construction problems. It has been for sale for one year. The house (still inhabited and perfectly preserved) is acknowledged globally as a unique, innovative and exemplary building. It features a timber frame structure with straw bale infill, modular construction, and the use of local materials.
New FAQ’s at Earthbagbuilding.com
The Frequently Asked Questions section of www.earthbagbuilding.com has been accumulating pertinent questions and answers for over a decade. These had been categorized into only about a half dozen pages, which had become overly long and cumbersome for finding specific information. I finally decided to organize them in such a way that it is now much … Read more
Flat Hyperadobe Walls
We discussed flattening earthbag walls in a previous blog post: Flattening Walls to Save Plaster
In that blog post (and the following Comments afterwards) I described some of the basics of this technique: tamp the sides of walls after several courses are complete; don’t wait too long or the soil will dry and be difficult to tamp; use enough clay in the mix so the earthbags are malleable; focus on eliminating awkward bulges; don’t tamp the walls completely flat – leave recesses between courses of bags so the plaster has something to grab onto.