Thread: Where do you live

Man you have a big house!

Originally Posted by PaulFLUS

Man you have a big house!

and the security looks pretty good too.

Get the contact to change his locks and you could probably retire on it Paul

Yea if you can handle the job I'll put in a good word for you with the Warden. In exchange...now let's see... a nice blueberry pie filled with locksmith tools.

Our joint in the north.


Advantages of the ‘city’, but the space of the country.
We like it here. Summers short, but gorgeous..

Here is my house of literal mud. I mean, the walls are actually made from the garden's soil. It's old fashioned. That's ok, I'm an old fashioned guy. The house is as old as my average razor, everything's fine. Well, I'm redoing almost everything inside, but that's par for the course lol

Mud walls,, so cool, and functional once clad.
Thanks for sharing !

Great house and interesting construction. We use mud on the seams of our drywall, well we call it mud but it's drywall compound.

Yea we call it adobe in these parts. Walls are often up to 3 feet thick to insulate from the summer heat but every time it rains they have to reapply the stuff unless it's clad with stucco.

Well it's not quite adobe, but it's close. It's clay all the same, but you have 4 basic ways to use it to make walls
- Adobe is when you make bricks of clay you let dry
- Cob is when you use wet clay and fiber (such as hemp) to build your wall
- Wattle and daub is when you use cob or things cob-like as a filler between timbers (it's over-simplified but you get the gist of it)
- Rammed earth is when you press wet mud between planks as you go along, holding everything together with layers of lime

Since it's damp in our parts, adobe not quite feasible, so around here they mainly went with rammed earth.
So yeah, the walls are about 3 feet thick indeed, which is not that bad in summer and not that bad in winter. Layers of insulation are still needed.

It's a wonderful material, with, that being said, a lot of trade-offs which can be expensive when you renovate. That, and the fact that after the world wars the knowledge of said trade offs has been lost and a lot of mistakes were made.

To wit, normally, if your eaves are setup correctly, rain should not be an issue. In our case, during the tobacco agricultural boom in our parts, they raised the roof, and plastered the walls with a concrete based stucco, which is... Bad.
Worst case scenario, and it does happen more often than necessary, to much waterproofing (ground included) around the walls, and water will rise through the walls, the clay becomes mud again, and the house falls apart. We should be safe, but in the future I will have to remove all the stucco, at which point I will have wood wool added to all the walls and an lime based stucco plastered over.

Aaaaaaanyhow, the topic can get real nerdy reaaaaaaaaaal quick and I won't bother you gents more with it.

Thanks for your interest and kind words anyway

Here's an alternative veiw of mine. My son has a drone with which he took pictures.


If you look really closely you can see me in the backyard waving.