Are you dreaming about having a nice home on a lake in the woods? Make sure you ask yourself the right questions and tick all the boxes before you commit.
Applying adobe by Tom Keeling
In this short video I go through the different ways you can test your the patches that we rendered in a previous post.
You are really going to be trying your hardest to remove the patches from the wall and damage them. You want to know if they are going to be easily damaged by a falling cupboard or by water bring spilled on them. You want to know if there is so much sand in the mix that it easily brushes off and may make a mess on the floor in future. You will also need to know if there is too much clay in the mix which could have made it crack too much as it dried.
Sand and clay mixture tests by Tom Keeling. Fazenda Tomati Portugal Permaculture Design Certificate 2019
In the video below, I cover some basic tests you can do to analyse your earth for rendering…
It is important to do as many tests as you can before applying an earthen finish. For me the main reason for doing this at every job is that the earth is always going to be a little bit different, even if in this case the earth was mined from the same site as a previous job.
We knew from before that this particular mine gave earth with a very nice percentage of clay to sand (25:75) which was ideal to work with, but even so we still carried out the basic tests to see how the mixtures fared in our particular conditions.