Outdoor and Ecological articles (sporadic Mondays) at http://blog.dxlogan.com/ and my main site is found at http://www.dxlogan.com/
Outdoor and Ecological articles (sporadic Mondays) at http://blog.dxlogan.com/ and my main site is found at http://www.dxlogan.com/
"You must be the change you want to see in the world." "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win." --Mahatma Gandhi
"Preach the Gospel always, and if necessary, use words." --Francis of Assisi.
"Family farms work when the whole family works the farm." -- Adam Klaus
Alder Burns wrote:Not sure what this stuff is, but the name reminds me of the two cabins I built in Georgia with old carpets stuccoed with cement. The result, with a little tweaking (mix the cement quite soupy, and wet the carpet with soapy water ahead of time to improve adhesion), is a rigid surface conforming to whatever shape the frame underneath is. The roof of the first cabin was framed in pine poles and bamboo, and had a deck of two thicknesses of cardboard and plastic under the carpets. I once had five people on that roof at once, and it never leaked, not in ten years. I began to refer to old carpets as the modern scrounger's equivalent of buffalo hide.....its flexible, durable, and so useful for so many things......
Alder Burns wrote:@ Fred: I mostly used short-nap carpet, just to save stucco since I wanted the fibers completely embedded. If the carpet was new (as in scraps from a new install project) I would let it sit out in the weather for a while, new carpet often has a water-repellent coating that I wanted to wear off. Usually I would attach the carpet to the frame dry and then stucco it, so only the outer, nap surface was stuccoed. I did play around with the idea of making square "shingles" stuccoed on both sides ahead of time but decided just using large pieces direct would be a lot quicker. The cardboard and plastic added additional strength to the roof, especially as I needed to be up on it in order to apply the stucco, and served for more waterproofing, in case moisture seeped through the carpet, as well as some insulation from the airspaces in the cardboard. Mostly it was an experiment in creating fairly quick, durable housing for free. The cement in the stucco for the roof was one of the few purchased inputs. Since the walls were under a two-foot overhang, I used a mud stucco on these (two or three coats of a clay-sand mix), with a thin wash of cement mixed with water and paint for color applied over the top with a brush.
Alder Burns wrote:
@Ellendra As I recall I tried to coat at least one whole piece in a session, probably just because mixing the concrete and all is a big project and a mess, so it seemed worth doing a lot each time; but I don't see any other reason why one couldn't do less than that.
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