House-Building Argentina Style

Every build we participate in is different. In Argentina, we have the luxury of an electric cement mixer, a steady source of water onsite, and all the tools we need. We don’t have a lot of shade, and the temperature is quite hot, but that’s OK – we all huddled under the one tree and made sure to drink lots of water.

Apparently houses under this program take a long time to complete, between 4 and 6 months, so we will not be completing this house. When we arrived, the footings had already been dug, 2 of the corner columns were complete, and the re-bar for the remaining columns was already in place. Our job was to continue working on the columns, and start building walls.

Laying blocks with a smile!

 

The columns consist of 4 long pieces of re-bar held in a rectangle shape by wire. These tubes are then set into the cement footings. When the concrete is fully dry, the re-bar is surrounded on 4 sides by wood, and then the center of the wood (containing the wire) is filled with concrete. Unfortunately we do not have much wood, and what we do have is borrowed, so the wood forms are leaky – which we fill with wet strips of concrete bags.

 

Estevan on column-fill duty

 

If anyone is keeping a cook-book, here are the mixing instructions  for the concrete to go inside the columns.

1)      6 buckets of rock

2)      2 bucket of cement

3)      4 to 6 buckets of sand

4)      Water (as needed)

We also have two separate mixing instructions for the first row of blocks (the non-lime mix), and the rest of the rows of blocks (the lime mix).

 

A Safety-Conscious member of the Mortar-Mixing Union

Other requirements:

1)      Don’t let the cement mixture get all stuck in the bottom of the mixer, because then you have to scrape it out and run the mixer with some bricks in it – to clean it out (ask me how we know that)

2)      Add the sand and water ‘pocito’ by ‘pocito’ (bit by bit), so you can monitor the wetness as you go. If it gets too wet, you will have to adjust on the fly (ask me how we know this)

3)      Concrete should look thick cake batter with walnuts in it

4)      Mortar should look like a nice fudgy brownie mix

Proud of her very first batch of mortar. Isn't it lovely!!

The 'Mix Masters'

Other tasks included preparing the floor area by levelling the ground, and then packing it down with tampers.

 

Learning how to 'Go Pound Sand...'

 

So far we have 5 rows of blocks on one wall and 1 row of bricks on a second wall. Estevan gave us a ‘two-thumbs up’ and a 10 out of 10 for our wall.