Casita de Barro: 2008

Wanna Blogg? Having you all connected through our travel blog was such a great experience that in a lot of ways helped us stay on the road (but also helped us deal with that departure from the mountains in NC). Eventually, our seven months long journey ended and again, we are giving technology the chance to link us with that part of our lives we miss so much. Getting immersed in our new Mexican life has taken us some time but we are pleased to tell you we are now getting full hands in our dream project of building our own house. The building process may be the main topic of the few following entries for this blog. Hope we’ll not bore you. If it helps, let me tell you, this first casita has been planned as a guesthouse to receive our travelling friends (yes you all!). We are hoping you guys will someday come visit us.

Finding The Perfect Spot

Our idea of living in the warmer country town of Atlixco (an hour from Puebla city) was thrown away right at the moment we stepped on this amazingly scenic spot in Tecuanipan (30 mins from Puebla city, half way to the Popocatepetl volcano). Far away from any crowded city, Tecuanipan, or San Jeronimo, makes it perfect for our intention of living in a small campesino community.

Casita de Barro

We learned that making adobe is very much like cooking mole, that famous Mexican chicken chocolate sauce. Everybody will tell you there’s one way to do it (and often it’s their own way). That's only because the "ingredients" are all different in different places. So, we had to learn the local way. Don Miguel, local adobe brick master with a 30 years of experience, taught us his arts. Here Manuel is keeping the rhythm for the mud to be just right.

At the same time, we started exploring the surrounding areas in order to collect materials we will need later. Oscar, who owns a "nopalera" provided us with some of his best cactus plants and Dulce, the architect helping us with the project, helped us cutting them to prepare the mix we will use to seal the walls.

A big hole in the north side of our land will provide us with a much needed water tank (20, 000 liters) that will be filled with filtered rain water collected by our guesthouse’ roof. We used the method of “ferrocemento” that saved a huge amount of the cement used for conventional tanks. Here, Ina is using our cactus mix (tequila was not added) to seal the walls of the tank.

The first weeks were all about adobe brick making. To be honest these were all but frustrating days because of the fact we couldn't make it even closer to the expected goal of 50 bricks a day.

Maybe it was because we had to believe a whole house could be built only with clay sand, and water. Here, Ina, well into the brick making, is adding some of the last 100 bricks. The excavated dirt was used to make the adobe bricks.

After the first 2 weeks, our land looked covered by adobe bricks.

The results, so far...