It takes someone pretty talented to be able to take beautiful photos of a concrete pour whilst standing on a ladder trying to get window trimming done. That person is not me, so if you like pretty more than practical forgive me my shortcomings and tune in tomorrow for some shiny. Earthship biotecture do their slabs in an interesting way with timber framing dividing it up into lots of little pours and the timber formwork itself becoming expansion joints. It means that you only have to do a few pours at a time, then when they are cured move on to the ones adjacent. Its fiddly, but no more so than having to do an awkward large pour and reach all the edges I guess. Its pretty with its red oiled wood a counterpoint to the greenish tint of their iron stain. If you want to be more sustainable you could do the same with a mud floor.

The formwork is leveled, and “porcupined” with screws so that the sides grip the concrete. Reinforcing mesh is cut to size and when the concrete is poured it is lifted up somewhere near the centre to give tensile strength. The concrete is hard troweled, timber sanded and stained, then the concrete is stained after it is cured for a few days.

Meanwhile outside the wind had picked up, the day before had been all sunshine and we were stripping of jackets in the heat. Today was freezing. Jerry and Dan were constructing bottle wall retaining walls, as simple as it gets without even cutting the bottles and making them into bricks. Through the pipe we could hear jack hammering all day, Dylan and Co were searching for a air duct that may or my not be there but was definitely at least 5 feet down in soil so frozen they at first they thought it was concrete. Enrique and I agreed we definitely had a pretty sweet deal with the indoor trimming.

See you tomorrow for some pretty.