Building walls brick by brick

Apparently some of you couldn't believe it when Susanne mentioned that the house was being built brick by brick, the traditional way. "Nobody builds houses that way", someone said.

Well, Juantxo does.

For the incredulous, here he is building (brick by brick) the walls of the bedrooms.

The exterior walls were also done this way and, in fact, they're load-bearing walls. That is, they form the structure of the house - together with two wooden pilars -, so they hold the weight of the entire house. There are no reinforced-concrete pilars anywhere in this house.

The other two rooms that you see opposite, whose walls Juantxo has just finished building, are the bathroom (right) and the dressing room (left).

Balcony

As we promised a week ago, here are the pictures of the structure for the balcony being set up by Joseba and Osvaldo.

Orientated to the South-West and completely protected from the North wind it is a nice and relaxed corner for spring-summer outdoor breakfasts.

A little bit of extreme gardenig

Sus and I have been on holidays for Easter. Our plan was to help Juantxo with his job, but he also got some days off to take his family to London. So instead, we've spent part of our holidays fighting brambles and wild roses to clear out a nice pice of bush at the south-western end of the plot.





Here is Donnou looking at part of the area that we've cleared out. Now it looks like a pretty civilized area, doesn't it? Believe me, before we started you couldn't see what there was on the other side.








He probably couldn't believe that a couple of "city guys" like us were capable of doing something like this and still look as if we were enjoying ourselves in the process. And, truth to be told, he's got a point: you cannot imagine how vicious the brambles and the wild roses were and how tough it was fighting them. But as hard as it is, it is also very rewarding to see all you've achieved at the end of the day.

The team

Here are the first pictures of the team that's building our house, taken at the plot a couple of days ago while we were having lunch. The builders brought salads, risotto, bread and sausages, and of course, some wine!

Juantxo is the mason (Steinmetz) and Mustafa his assistant. Joseba is the carpenter (Schreiner) and Osvaldo one of his assistants. Juantxo (behind Edorta) and Joseba (beard) are brothers and together run a small company called B.O.Z., specialized in bio-architecture and traditional ways of building. For some strange reason, Joseba insists on calling his brother "gordo" (fat man) - not as if you'd see much of a difference between the two...

For those of you who don't know what Juantxo and me are using to drink wine, it is called bota (zahatoa, in basque). It's a traditional handicrafted container made of goat skin, generally used to carry and drink wine. In one one of the links you can watch a video of how they make them.

Osvaldo, one of the assistants, is from South America, the other one, Mustafa, is from Algier. He's been with the brothers for more than 8 years. As a practicing muslim, he's the one who prays to Mekka in our unfinished house at lunchtime - as you see we get all the help we could ask for!

We've started with the walls on the second floor

We've started to build the Termoarcilla walls on the second floor. This will be the inner wall. There'll be another outer wall made of normal brick and the space in between will again be filled up with Vermiculite.

The wodden beams for the balcony are also here. It's beeing installed
this week, so hopefully we will show it to you soon.