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The Project: A 2,163 square foot house utilizing dry stack concrete block construction with a central courtyard and based on the Spanish colonial-era missions in San Antonio. The Challenge: Can a forty-something married couple design and build an attractive, efficient and mostly paid-for house while remaining sane, solvent and married? With no actual prior construction experience? Hmmmmm - let's check in on our Contestants and see how they're doing... |
| Our construction schedule calls for the window headers to be finished this week. Here is a look at one of the half moon windows in the master suite. The armature of metal lath is stapled to the plywood form and extends beyond the edges of the window. This strengthens the ferrocement of the headers directly over the windows. Behind the plywood form we have made a sandwich of 3/4 inch foam insulating board to fill up the space directly over the window. |  |
| The window in the photo above with two coats of cement which has been hand-troweled into the armature. The rounded edges, also called bullnose edges, look like the adobe construction of the Spanish colonial-era missions in San Antonio which are the North Star of our planning and design for the house. |  |
| Another shot of the same window and its neighbor. The header over the window on the right is made of recycled blocks of expanded foam which came from the packing material in a computer box. The closed-cell structure of the foam provides good insulation and obviously took the cement stucco without the need for any lath. |  |
| One of the windows in the guest wing, part of a set of three. The metal lath is tucked above the top of the window and bent around the edge of the header form and then covered with two or three coats of cement. This window's coats of cement were reinforced with layers of nylon mesh netting. The middle window of the set, at left, shows how we've got 2x4 boards inserted into the blocks to provide a frame to nail the plywood form to. |  |
| Your humble correspondent caught in a reflective moment (or possibly making a "pane" of myself) while getting a picture of one of the master suite's half moon windows. Notice how we've been able to form the lath into a brow that protrudes over the windows to deflect water from the window sills. This kind of work is a good example of the combination of grace and strength afforded by ferrocement construction. |  |
| Want to see a rough floor plan?Want to be notified when we post new pictures? Just e-mail us! Want to see the rest of the story? Click on Gimme Shelter Home Page. |
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| Next installment: The Epic of Gilgamesh-crete Click HERE |
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