You gotta have some "before" pictures...
Before...
Kylie with her bunny, Dutch...before the mud...
Digging for clay. We just dug the clay up right behind the house. Here J. and J2. work hard to dig and sift the clay....J2 worked for six hours digging clay...making sure that we always had enough...
Women with Machetes. A frightening sight! They were happy to get off "machete" duty (cutting up the straw to mix with the mud) and actually put mud on the house. Everyone was so kind; they worked hard!!
Joni demonstrates how to mix the mud in a wheelbarrow. We had two wheelbarrows making mud for many hours of the day. Henry Ford never had an assembly line so efficient!
P. putting mud on the house. My thanks to P. for gathering our Saturday Morning Discussion Group to hep work on the house!
Joni, P and J3 putting mud on the house...
More mud work. It took us a couple of wheelbarrows full to get the right mixture of clay to sand. Turns out the right mixture was 1 bucket of clay to 1/2 bucket of sand. That made the mixture sticky enough to adhere to the straw bales.
J3 putting mud on the wall...."take some down and pass it around"...
Mudding a corner...
P, Joni. S and R applying more mud...
Joni sticking mud on the difficult to manage lip under the bales... Joni had the most talent at doing this difficult work. She earned the nickname: "Mud Whisperer"....
And what it looked like when finished...
Enough for today...time for a barbecue!
More... 
How it looked this morning....Thanks to all who came and helped out!! Joni and I are humbled by the generosity of the folks who worked so very hard on this "Mud Day". Thanks!!
5 comments:
Wish I could have been there! Looks great.
Kia ora Allan,
What a great day, inspirational that all those folks were willing to give a hand. Hope they got a cold one at the end of the day.
Cheers,
Robb
Ian,
:) I don't know. This place looks like it was built by a bunch of drunken hobbits. Catiewonkus as heck. Been looking at Chiras' gospel of plastering...well, I don't think we measure up to his standards.
But we try. We try...
Robb,
Yes, we had a few cold ones afterwards. And we howled at the moon too...
Looks like a palace now! Did you plaster the inside as well? I love Joni's new nickname, the Mud Whisperer.
Hi Kathy...
A palace? A mud palace?
Nope, we haven't plastered the inside yet. We still have much to finish on the outside of the house. Two more layers of mud to put on the walls. We probably won't get the inside done until Obama's second term. :)
I like Joni's nickname too... She really does have a talent for this.
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