Thirty years ago, I had a vision to build an adobe house. For as long as I can remember, I wanted to build my own house. My fascination with adobe grew out of some casual exposure to adobe buildings in the San Francisco Bay area, along with a compelling search for a building process that had minimal environmental impacts. I studied home design, influenced greatly by A Pattern Language written by Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa and Murray Silverstein. I also dove into a study of adobe and how to make bricks and build with them. Armed with an abundance of book learning, my wife Terrie and I packed our belongings into a 20-foot-long 1967 International box truck and left our suburban life in Marin County. We headed to a plot of land on the southern face of the Grand Mesa in Colorado, just outside the town of Cedaredge. We had two children in tow, Whitney (3), and Ben, under a year. We began the building phase of our life in the spring of 1990. Although versed in the theory and vocabulary of building, I lacked practical experience in nearly every aspect. Perhaps the largest disconnect between dream and reality was the scope of the project. We didn’t have an abundance of funds to finance our adventure, but what we lacked in both money and experience, we made up for with hard work, resourcefulness, and tenacity.
The first phase of building our adobe home was excavating and building the foundation. We hired a neighbor with a backhoe, who spent several weeks removing dirt and making trenches according to the footprint of our house that we staked into the ground. The removed dirt became our source of clay for the over 10,000 bricks which would eventually envelope our space. As soon as we broke ground, we began to test soil using the methods I had read about. We filled jars with a mixture of the tailings of our excavation and discovered that, with the exception of a few inches of loam, what lay below was clay mixed with an abundance of basalt rubble ranging in size for several inches to several feet in diameter. The first layer of clay was deep brownish red and very expansive. Further down in the earth the reddish clay gave way to caliche. The caliche seemed to work well in our experiments, though we had to add substantial amounts of sand to reduce the concentration of clay. Eventually we got to the point that we could determine the amount of sand we needed by the feel of the mud as we mixed.
For three years we spent the late spring, summer, and fall, making and stacking our bricks into the walls. By the end of the third year we had a roof over head and migrated into our shell of a house from the Air Stream Trailer that we had called home. At the time of the move the window openings were covered with sheets of plastic and the doors were sheets of plywood. Even so, we reveled in the rustic space, spending the first winter huddled around the living room fireplace.
Recently our eldest daughter Whitney, following the path of her parents, has decided to build an adobe house for herself. At the same time, a friend has requested assistance in building an adobe house for his family. Stimulated by both these projects, I have revisited my years making bricks. Subsequent to finishing my home, I went on to build four more adobe homes, making the bricks for two of them. My memories start with pure magic of mixing clay, sand, and water together to make a timeless, durable, and beautify building material. The memory of lifting three hundred and fifty thousand pounds of dirt multiple times is staggering, but the pain felt in the shoulders and back after ten hours of shoveling and lift has all but faded. Only my arthritic knees bear witness to the strain on my body of heavy lifting decades later. We left the adobe bricks exposed in several walls in our home. I look at them and wonder, filled with awe at the simplicity of adobe, one of the oldest building materials aside from stone on earth. There are ruins that date back to 8300 BC with some buildings over 800 years old still used today!
As I revived memories, I have also had to recreate recipes and techniques. The internet provides a valuable resource describing many of the thousands of ways people have put mud together to build homes. At the time we built, books were the most readily available information technology. I was able to consult with a few experienced “adobeleiros”, but for in the end, I had to get my hands dirty to really learn.
Our process started with our excavation, which we sifted through a ½ screen made with hardware cloth stretched over a frame of 2 x 4’s. We then mixed the clay with sand and water in an old cement mixer. We had to bring the sand to our property to get a good mix of clay and sand that would not crack. We found that crusher fines, the waste product of rock crushing for gravel worked the best. After the mixture was thoroughly and evenly mixed, we dumped it onto a cart that we had made from the wheels and axels of an old Volkswagon. From the cart we poured the mud mix into our brick molds. We had two molds that each made three bricks. With the mix over the mold we pushed the mud into the corners of the mold, pressing to make sure there were no voids. Next, we screened the top of the mold with a trowel to level off the top. When both molds were filled, we lifted the molds off carefully jiggling them to release the bond between the wood and mud. We washed the molds in a barrel of water, then repeated the process. On a good day, with Terrie and I working, we could make 200 bricks.
The bricks laid in the sun over night to begin to harden and dry. The next day we would carefully stand the bricks on their ends to increase the exposed surface for more even drying. A day later the bricks were stiff enough to be moved to consolidate them to make room for more bricks. They were very fragile and remained standing on their sides for at least a week. After they were mostly dried, we stacked the bricks on pallets arranged around the building site. They usually dried for at least a month before we placed them in the wall using the same mud that we made the bricks with as mortar.
Occasionally family and friends came to experience the brick making. There were some who compared it to the Egyptian’s treatment of the Israelites from biblical times; most of our volunteer helpers captured the magic that I felt in transforming basic earth elements into architectural ones. The walls of our home contain the spirit and joy of those helpers and bring joy to me every time I rub my hands along their contoured earthen surfaces.