So, Thread continued. Sorry about how this is coming out slowly. Just the work load I am under right now.
Where we left off:
What you have to do, based on when you build.
I am going to continue to simplify this, and rely on folks to post questions, otherwise this will end up longer than War and Peace....
So, I will lay out a typical scenario...
You have found your nice chunk of land. You have water and septic taken care of. BTW, these are the most important things EVER.
Now, you want to put something habitable on your dream property. Like many folks, maybe your dreams are champagne, and your wallet is beer. The answer is to start your design as a "workshop" that is NOT intended to to be inhabited. Fast forward a year or two, and this structure becomes your garage, and gets incorporated into the larger design, or is a self standing unit. There is nothing that says that a garage can not have a bathroom, etc. Start with that. Also, I am using the term "rebar" all through this discussion. The term can mean any of the following: Hazle branches, Bamboo, Any wood that is long enough and strong against domestic pests and toxins.
Now we return to the Foundation discussion. As you have already read, you have a design (lets just say it's a detached garage), you have culled your acreage for rock, dug your trenches, and laid your foundation footers to within 6 inches of grade, set your j-bolts, created your rebar mess, built your forms and you are ready to pour. Great, this means per-apocalypse and all is permitted. Go to town.
Post-apocalypse, you will not have concrete. You will not have rebar. You will not have nice lumber for forms. What you should have are Polypropylene woven bags. You will use these to make earth bags. Literally, bags filled with earth. Having some cement to add in to the earth mix is great, but not required. I have found that double or triple bagging is a good precaution.
The steps:
1. Fill bags with earth mixture. Lay them around your foundation until you are ready to place them..They weigh a lot, 110-130 lbs. each.
2. IF your lot has a grade, you may want to consider "stepping" your rubble trench to allow you to lay the earthbags flat. This will help your end structure to be level and not have sag points in the walls.
3. You will need to drive rebar pins into the rubble trench to a depth of about 18". These will keep the earthbags from shifting, and those pins need to extend above the rubble to a height of at least 12", and perhaps as high as 24". Using a set of pipes that allow the pins to be driven into the rubble helps. Best case is that you place these before you fill in the rubble, and each pin should have at least an 8" leg that extends at a 90 degree angle. Bend it around to keep it plum, more or less as you fill the rubble trench.
4. Once the rubble is flattened out to a level bed, cover it with gravel and pound it out as flat as possible. You want to have about 4" of gravel on top of the rubble, but still have the level of the rubble about 8" below grade.
5. At this point, you cut and lay out pvc pipe sections that are at least 2" wider than your actual earthbag foundation. These will become conduits to allow wire, or strapping to pass underneath your footing that ties the soon to be built straw bale wall to the foundation. These pipes should be placed at 6-10" intervals, so there are a lot of them. Once your walls are built, you will "sew" through these pipes and tie / compress the wall structure down to the foundation in much the same way that boxes are strapped to shipping pallets.
6. Lay the bags end to end on top of the rubble trench, and impale them onto the rebar pins. Use a big sledge hammer to get them to cooperate.
With each course of earthbags, use a 16-24" long rebar pin to drive through it like a big nail to lock it to the course of earthbags below.
7. Get your entire foundation / kneewall / earthbag stack level. This takes persuation, and sometimes emptying out some of the earth to get things to work out.
TAKE YOUR TIME WITH EACH STEP. KEEP EVERYTHING AS LEVEL AS POSSIBLE! One mistake can be amplified to 2-4 inches as you complete your structure. Just ask me how I know that...
So, to review:
1. You have found your paradise, and you have a design for a structure.
2. You have water and septic done.
3. You have dug your trenches to the depth and width required by your climate, soil type, building code (or not), bale size, etc.
4. You have properly lined your trenches, and filled them with all of the proper layers to create a stable rubble foundation / footing.
5. You have done all of the proper concrete work (Pre-apocalypse) or done a lot of manual labor to use earthbags (post-apocalyse).
Now, you are ready to set up your walls. This is the fun part. It goes fast if you have 3-5 guys. I did a 680+ Sq. ft. bungalow alone, but that was a lot of work! 2 days, and a lot of sore muscles.
Now, onto the wall raising:
The Steps:
1. Layout (with spraypaint) where your doors and windows are.
2. Build the proper wooden bucks for the doors and windows, label them, and set them where they need to be to remind everyone what is going where.
3. Start your first course (layer) of straw bales in any corner. But! That corner becomes your prime-corner. Every course begins and ends there.
4. When you come to a door or window, the bales that butt up to that opening may need to be custom sized. Take a look at Tanvils book for methods of doing that. Generally speaking, this means tying off a bale to a shorter length, and then removing the original ties. Set the remainder aside, you will need it later!
5. Build up the walls until you reach you desired / designed height. This can / will be up to 3 inches higher than the design calls for. This is because the straw may need to settle. Remember the pvc pipe under the earthbags? This is it's purpose.
6. You will now build a box-beam that sits on top of the strawbale wall, and gets tied to the foundation with either steel braided wire, or Polypropylene strapping material.
Crap! Phone call!
More later.