Shoji and - again - mud walls

Tomo spent the week at the house doing paper work, and checking the kitchen progress while his two kids collected insects and frogs. He also managed to use these exquisite artist's washi (=Japanese paper), for our Shoji.

This one is blue, but we have the other side in green.



He passed the baton on to me, and I went again at my normal occupation - the preparation, application and finishing of mud-walls (again!).

The weather was on Saturday, so I first created adobe bricks to fill the special heat storing wall segment. Last time I made a start on it, but ran out of material. So on Saturday I made 24 bricks, which was three 20kg bags of sand and an nearly same amount in volume of red earth. My back muscles bear witness to the magnitude of the task.



Later it started raining and kept doing so the whole Sunday. But fortunately the DIY market had the Silica sand in stock, that is key ingredient of the finish wall layer. Despite the rain and the absence of volunteer helpers, I mixed up with pulverised straw, clay, a lot of silica sand and worked from 06:00h till 16:00h nearly without break.

I managed to finish 5 panels on the western side (darker coloured patches), covering the cracked and smoke blackened original wall, as well as one of our new wall panels (not shown on photo). The quantities of sand and clay should be chosen such that the clay merely makes the sand sticky. The trowel, then pushes the sand over the wall, evening out bumps. The straw prevents cracking. With a helper, the remaining panels should be finish-able within one day.