What I Did on Spring Break, or How to Build a House Out of Dirt

Most of the material used to build the houses we worked on in Santa Rosa de Copan came from the actual ground they were built on. It's a pretty fascinating process, and it saves the Santa Rosa affiliate about 25% of the cost of each house vs. using cinder block -- kind of a buy-four-and-get-one-free deal.

Most of the dirt came from digging foundations. Every foundation is dug manually in a sort of hand-to-hand combat using shovels (la pala), pickaxes (la piocha) and a heavy iron digging bar (la barra). Keith and Andrew dug more than one foundation, and that is hard work. The two of them seemed drawn to the toughest jobs, but I never heard a peep of complaint from either.

The footer consists of boulders about the size of a basketball set in layers of concrete. The boulders are quite large when they come off the truck and have to be broken with a sledgehammer.
Then we carry them in wheelbarrows or by hand and place them around the foundation...

...then place them carefully into the footer...

...and cover them with concrete carried by hand in buckets. Lather, rinse, repeat until it's up to the proper height, and presto! A foundation for a new home.

From there it all starts with dirt. But not just any dirt -- it has to be screened to get out big rocks, sticks, and trash. All of the dirt used to make the houses comes from the building site. Basically you just shovel dirt through screens like the one below. It takes a staggering quantity of clean dirt to build one of these houses.

Screened dirt is piled up in measured amounts (X number of wheelbarrow loads) and mixed with lime, cement and a small amount of water. The pile is mixed on the ground entirely by hand, and the resulting mixture looks like damp dirt. I expected the adobe mix to be much wetter, but it's really just damp.


This mix is then packed into block presses which compress the mix under extreme pressure using only manpower and leverage.


When the blocks come out, they are very fragile and are carried by hand to a flat surface where they dry in the sun. It takes about three days to cure the blocks before they are ready for building. In the picture below, team members stand blocks on end after they have dried for a day lying flat. This makes room for more block, and exposes more surface area to the air for drying.

When the blocks are dry, they are carried by wheelbarrow to the house where they'll be used. To lay the blocks to form walls requires lots and lots of mezcla (mortar) which is mixed by hand from screened dirt, sand, water and cement mix. Mixing a big batch of mezcla is one of the first things done every day, and it is hard work. Evidently so hard, in fact, that both Andrew and Bob are totally pooped.


The blocks are laid just like cinder block, with steel rebar running vertically in all corners and wall junctions for reinforcement. Thick steel wire goes in the mortar joint between every third course to tie the walls together. Below Molly and Fernando start a new course of block on an interior wall, while Megan demonstrates how to fill in mortar joints.



After twelve courses of block are laid, we pour a band of steel-reinforced concrete around the top of all the walls. This band also forms the header above all of the doors and windows. This requires rebar cages made of dozens of square wire forms that become the ribs of the cage, holding together four steel rebar rods that are each about ten meters long. Below Molly, Pat and Sue use the bolt cutters to cut wire for the ribs into uniform lengths. Below that, Judy helps one of the Hondurans build a rebar cage.


The cages are then bent to fit the walls and attached to the vertical rebar. Below, Steve and Gerard attach a cage to a wall we built, and Fernando gives the thumbs-up to indicate that everything is "cheke leke" with this cage.


The masons build wooden forms along the top of the wall around the cages to hold the concrete. These cages have to be very stout due to the weight of the concrete, and must hold tight to the wall so that the concrete doesn't leak out. Here one of the masons fits a piece in a bathroom window on the bottom of the form. There was not a single power saw on the entire site, so every board was cut with a hand saw.

After the forms are set up, we mix up an enormous batch of concreto to pour into the form around the rebar cages. Actually I think it took at least two enormous batches to do the trick for each house. Here Matt, Keith, Andrew and Bob are standing around looking like they just mixed that concreto, though probably the Hondurans did most of the work. ;-)


We shovel the concrete into 5-gallon buckets and hoist it up top to pour into the forms. Nacho Libre demonstrates how it's done. He's always stylin' with the do rag or something else on his head...such a slave to fashion.

After the concrete band has hardened, the masons add a couple more courses of block, then build the gable ends of the house to hold the roof.

The roofers then come and put on steel rafters and a corrugated metal roof. (Sorry, no visuals, though I did see it done).

The inside and outside finish on the walls is concrete stucco. Before applying the stucco, however, the walls have to be roughed up to hold the stucco mix. Nacho and Bob got the short straw and did that job for a day or so, which completely covered them in dust. It was one of the nastiest jobs of the week, but they stuck with it and never complained. Below Nacho shows off his mad guns while using the battle axe to rough up the walls.


Here is the finished product, with painted stucco walls, a poured concrete floor, and a few homeowner flourishes added for effect. Each house has two bedrooms, one bath, and a greatroom/kitchen, in a tight little package of 400-450 s.f.