Building with Papercrete and Paper Adobe

Author(s): Gordon Solberg

ISBN: 1928627005

Order From: Amazon
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Papercrete is a type of industrial strength paper maché made with paper and cardboard, sand and portland cement. The concept is quite simple — you build a mixer (essentially a huge kitchen blender), mix the dry ingredients with water to form a slurry, cast the slurry into blocks or panels, and let it dry. When it hardens up, papercrete is lightweight (it’s 80 percent air), an excellent insulator (R 2.8 per inch), holds its shape even when wet, and is remarkably strong (compressive strength of 260 psi). And, since it contains paper fibers, it has considerable tensile strength as well as compressive strength. Papercrete is a remarkable building material, and is remarkably inexpensive, since all the ingredients (except for the cement) are free or nearly free.

This collection of articles is not a step-by-step manual, but does offer a wealth of information about the topic. It’s the most comprehensive source of papercrete information available in one place. You’ll see two ways to build a papercrete mixer, several dome projects, the use of slipforms, several types of block forms, a structure made from paper bales and how several pioneers are pushing the evolution of papercrete.

The packet includes issues 1 through 5 of Earth Quarterly, plus Papercrete News Issues 1 and two. The book Building with Papercrete was a collection of articles that appeared in the Earth Quarterly (Issues 1 – 4 ). The book is now out of print, but this packet contains everything that appeared in the book, and considerably more.

1999 – 2000, 168 pages

Build Your Own Stone House: Using the Easy Slipform Method

Author(s): Karl Schwenke, Sue Schwenke

Publisher: Storey Books

Paperback: 176 pages

ISBN: 0882666398

ISBN-13: 978-0882666396

Order From: Amazon.com
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The simple and functional beauty of a well-built stone house never seems to go out of style. Nearly twenty years after Karl and Sue Schwenke first constructed their Vermont home, their classic book has been revised, updated, and reissued for a new generation of readers.

Using the same easy “slipform” method of construction, the Schwenkes have over the years added to their original stone house and built barns and other structures. And their book is still the best hands-on source available for people interested in building a stone house “from the ground up.”

Build Your Own Stone House features straightforward and complete instructions on a variety of topics, including:

— The materials – stone, sand, cement, and others

— How and where to site your stone house

— Excavating the site, estimating the materials needed, and figuring the ground load

— Setting up, using, and removing the forms

— Pouring piers, footings, and basement walls

— Building the stone walls, corners, and door and window openings

— Constructing the floors, ceilings, and roof

— Building your own fireplace

Clear illustrations and useful tables round out the book, which also includes all-new information on the best options and materials for insulating your home.

About the Author

Karl Schwenke is a professional writer who lives with wife Sue on a farm in Newbury, Vermont, where they have raised strawberries, pigs and hay among other crops. Together, this couple has written the book Build Your Own Stone House, and Karl wrote the Storey title Successful Small-Scale Farming. His other work includes Sierra North and Sierra South from Wilderness Press, an organization in Berkeley, California, that he co-founded after graduating from college. Karl has also written In a Pig’s Eye (Chelsea Green Publishing).

Sue Schwenke is a teacher who lives with husband Karl on a farm in Newbury, Vermont, where they have raised strawberries, pigs and hay among other crops. Together, this couple has written the book Build Your Own Stone House.

Stone House: A Guide to Self-Building With Slipforms

Author: Tomm Stanley

Publisher: Stonefield (March 1, 2004)

Paperback: 208 pages

ISBN-10: 0473099705

ISBN-13: 978-0473099701

Order From: Amazon.com

You won’t need to be an expert stonemason or even have much construction experience to build your own house with one of the world’s most traditional building materials–stone. Stone House: A Guide to Self-Building with Slipforms contains all the information you’ll need to successfully build a stone home for yourself, from clearing the building site to topping the stone walls in preparation for roof framing.

While providing a wealth of information on a range of relevant subjects, Tomm Stanley uses an instructional narrative to lead readers through the process of building with stone and slipforms. This is the first book dedicated to slipform stone masonry in many years. Topics include:* Traditional stonemasonry and slipforming,* Basic geology and where to source suitable stone,* Passive solar principles,* Concrete making and techniques for molding and casting concrete, and * Methods for restoring recycled wooden windows and doors. There’s even a section on the usage of metric measurement written especially for Americans from the view of an American now living in a metric country.