Subfloors

Paul Mallory Owner-Builder Support Project - Santa Fe, NM

I had a school group help me excavate the floors to get the subfloor to the correct height. We ended up moving about ten tons of dirt the old fashioned way: wheelbarrows and shovels. I then tamped the ground and added 6” of rounded gravel. I used a laser level to get everything level and add guiding lines for later when I pour the floor. I had only used a homemade water level up to this point. In conclusion, I wish I bought a laser level a long time ago.

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Interior Earthen Plaster

Paul Mallory Owner-Builder Support Project - Santa Fe, NM

I finished the interior plaster after applying two coats total. I spent a lot of time with my string lines when laying the bricks and when rasping the bricks, so I decided two coats was plenty. I took stock of my building schedule at the New Year and concluded that I needed to pick up the pace. I reached out to the earth building community and received lots of help. It still was a lot of work.

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Ceiling Install

Paul Mallory Owner-Builder Support Project - Santa Fe, NM

I installed 1x6 tongue and groove ceilings. I used 16’ boards and built a few ladder type supports to hold one side as I nailed in the other. I did much of it myself and had to wrestle some of the boards in at times. I also was required by the city of Santa Fe to install an air barrier between the ceiling and the trusses for energy efficiency. I used house wrap for that.

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Stucco

Paul Mallory Owner-Builder Support Project - Santa Fe, NM

I chose to stucco the outside of the house. I wanted to use earthen plaster but felt it would have been a fragile bond if I had applied it to the exterior insulation. I also wanted to get it done quickly and seal things up on the outside of the house as the temperature was dropping. The goal was to continue working inside the house during the winter.

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Window Install

Paul Mallory Owner-Builder Support Project - Santa Fe, NM

I called in all my favors and was grateful to get a large crew out to help with window install. The rough bucks were perfectly sized and square and the windows slid right in. I chose to use large windows to try to maximize southern glazing. If I had a lot of smaller windows and adobe bricks between each one, I wouldn’t have been able to achieve the correct amount of window square footage for a passive solar design. I sized my windows with help from Edward Mazria’s The Passive Solar Energy Handbook. I needed about 25% of the square footage in windows as the square footage of the floor plan.

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Plaster Workshops

Paul Mallory Owner-Builder Support Project - Santa Fe, NM

With help from Adobe in Action, I was able to host a series of earthen plaster workshops, taught by Issac Logsdon. I learned a lot and met great people, and had some plastered walls by the end. We learned about sourcing materials, tools, techniques, throwing mud, mixing, and it got me thinking about the next stages of the project and how things will be finished in the house.

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Insulation Installation

Paul Mallory Owner-Builder Support Project - Santa Fe, NM

After lots of deliberation I chose to insulate the exterior of the house with 2” rigid foam boards. I couldn’t find mineral wool boards that weren’t almost three times the cost and months out on delivery. It was unfortunate, but I wanted my project to continue to move forward and not be held up waiting for deliveries. I attached the insulation with 5” spiralized nails with a head. The 4” weren’t deep enough.

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Repurposed Pallets for Soffits

Paul Mallory Owner-Builder Support Project - Santa Fe, NM

I chose to use repurposed pallets for my soffits after doing a trial and seeing how much I liked the look. The work was painstaking and time consuming: breaking the pallet, cutting the board, sanding, staining, then attaching, and keeping track of different length boards during the course of the project. I did discover a pallet breaker, a tool used to break pallets apart while minimizing damage. I’m not sure I would have done the soffits like this had I known how much work it would be, but too late now.

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Roof Finishing

Paul Mallory Owner-Builder Support Project - Santa Fe, NM

In early January, almost 7 months after laying the first adobe brick, we got the roof on. It is a metal, pro panel roof from Bar C. They were very professional and friendly and answered many questions about ordering and installation. In March of 2021, we started up work again after a long rest. We began by adding sheathing to the gable ends and covering it with roofing felt. We ordered windows recently and will be working on soffits, gutters, doors in the meantime.

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Roof Decking

Paul Mallory Owner-Builder Support Project - Santa Fe, NM

We were racing the clock as we were adding the roof decking. Prices were going up by the day on OSB and plywood and winter was coming. We were also getting tired from such a long summer of full time jobs, laying thousands of bricks, and of course the pandemic.

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Lintels, Bond Beam & Trusses

Paul Mallory Owner-Builder Support Project - Santa Fe, NM

We plan on installing very large windows, so of course we needed very large lintels. We paid a guy $200 to place the lintels on the walls. Best $200 ever spent. We did a 4-layer wooden bond beam and tied them into gringo blocks with a metal strapping. Then we had to figure out how to get 40' trusses on the bond beam. We pushed some up the side with four people and a few long crutches built from 2x4s. Once we ran out of room to slide them over the bond beam, we built a ramp on the back of the house and slid them up. Both methods worked really well as long as we had about 3 or 4 people.

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Adobe Wall Work

Paul Mallory Owner-Builder Support Project - Santa Fe, NM

Next, we added our speed leads and doorways. We worked almost every weekend for almost three months and had as many friends help while still maintaining social distance. We built during the monsoons and got lucky that they weren't too wet in 2020. After much deliberation, we added some asphalt emulsion to the mortar because of the long duration putting up the walls and the fact we were building during the monsoons. We bought our bricks from NM Earth. They really treated us well and are very professional.

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Project Foundation Work

Paul Mallory Owner-Builder Support Project - Santa Fe, NM

We took the tarps off the exterior foundation in March of 2020. What a year we were in for. My partner Shannon and I both kept our full time jobs during the pandemic, so our goal was to get the interior foundation laid, the walls up, and the roof on before winter came.

We decided to build our interior walls of adobe for extra thermal mass and because we like the feel of interior adobe walls. For that, we had to pour an interior foundation and locked it into the exterior foundation with rebar we placed in the exterior CMU stem wall.

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