Independence and Dirt Days

The earth is finally moving here. A dozer came on site today and began pushing the clay stockpiled some 15 years ago into a mountain for the purpose of making CEB blocks. Even the weather is cooperating as it has dropped from over 100 into the high 80’s for a few days! Here’s an early morning shot of the dozer at work. He did a nice job of cutting and blending the in-situ clay and sandy-clay.

We’ll need at least 12,000 blocks dimensioned 12”long by 3.75” thick and 6” wide to make all the 10 ft. high walls in the new house. 6 blocks stacked up together will make 1 cubic foot of wall. Each block weighs about 20 pounds and requires almost one 1/2 of a 5 gal. bucket of dirt. Nine such buckets make up one tractor load and we’ll add 30 pounds of cement powder and a fine spray of water to make 15 blocks. Three tractor bucket loads or 27 cubic feet make about 1 cubic yard of dirt. And 1 yard makes nearly 50 blocks. There are 240 cubic yards of dirt in the stockpile and that is what it will take to make the 12,000 blocks we need. We hope to press about 500 blocks a day. Come and join us.

The work place will be a “No-watching” zone, however.

And we did pass the rigorous duck inspection