Building Houses: Part 1

So, I don't know how many of you have ever built houses... While I have worked on fixing up my own house, I have never built one from scratch. I suppose a good analogy would be baking or cooking from scratch. Flour, water, salt etc.

When we arrived Monday morning, here's what we found: dirt, water, cement mix, concrete mix, gravel, shovels, and trowels. The pictures below depict the starting point.



One of the first tasks: Move the block from it's current location by the road, to the middle of the two houses. The solution: form a human chain and pass the block from person to person. In the picture to the right, it appears as if a couple of the Nicaraguans grabbed the most difficult job - lifting the block off the ground and to the line. Actually, everyone was very good about rotating through the hardest physical tasks so I am sure others helped with this task. In the block line, I quickly discovered the value of momentum. When we were spaced correctly, you could leverage the swinging motion of the person next to you to sort of redirect the block to the next person. Here, Lisa is about to swing the block to Bill. Anna and Susan are early waiting.

Next, we had to begin the cement mixing. We had to mix two different types of cement, one type for the "pours" and a second type that was used as mortar between the block. The recipe for the first type included unsifted dirt, cement mix, gravel and water. In the photo to the right, Pawan and Anna are filling up the wheel barrow with dirt. Then someone would move the dirt, and other ingredients to a location in close proximity to the houses. The process for the second type of cement was similar, though, the dirt we used for mortar had to be sifted before being moved. This was a new idea to me, when was the last time you "sifted" dirt, I mean isn't dirt just dirt?

In the photo below, Susan loads dirt onto the sifter while Anne and Minnette move the sifter back and forth. When done, the dirt was loaded into the wheel barrow and moved to the mixing area. Paul, in the red shirt, pulls one of the wheel barrows backward. Where am I you ask? Well someone had to capture these shots in film.

Cement Mixing:

Once we got the dirt, cement mix and gravel (if required) to the mixing location, we had to take the huge pile and split into two smaller piles. Once divided, we then moved everything back into one pile The purpose here was to create an equal consistency of cement, dirt and gravel. At this point we then created a volcano crater in the middle of the pile. This allowed us to add water to the mixture without it spilling over. The perfect volcano is below. On the bottom right, Michelle and Danny begin the process of manual cement mixing.

Wikipedia defines a concrete mixer as: a device that homogeneously combines cement, aggregate such as sand or gravel and water to form concrete. A typical concrete mixer uses a revolving drum to mix the components. Here is the Bridges version of a concrete mixer: 4 -6 people surround the volcano and move in a circular motion shoveling a little bit of dirt from the bottom outside of the volcano into the middle. In the picture below, Roxane, Michelle, Vinnie, Danny, Jason and Jon take the first turn at mixing the cement. Tae and Anna are waiting to provide relief. The process of mixing cement took somewhere between 20 - 30 minutes.

Next, I'll describe the actual construction of the house. If you read on you will be all ready to start building your own house!

n