Archanes

Whoever looked at it gave me the advice to leave it just as it is. I thought about it but couldn’t help it. I felt that it needed to be removed.

It was in two cement layers. After removing the first one humidity was getting visible and the smell was not the nicest also.

Under the second one I found soil. But the surface is a mix of soil and lime. Underneath I found finally the native earth used to build the house. It’s colour is dark brown and contains only a little quantity of clay. But the clay seems pretty strong.

Working time to remove thr cement plaster on the inner walls of the first floor. Including putting i in bags and brungung them to the dump site. Inly manual work and no machinery used: about 100 hours.

Surface cleared (in square meters): about 93.

Quantity removed: about 5700 kg.

Finally I removed manually all the inner cement plaster from the first floor. The last wall represents about 15 square meters, 800 kg of plaster…

Totally I removed about 7’500kg of cement plaster so far.

I have almost completed the removal of the inner cement plaster of the first floor.

Only one more wall to go:

… an autumn arrived today with a great thunderstorm.

And the removing of the cement plaster is almost completed on the first floor.

Todays work sample:

 

In order to let the outside walls dry, all the cement plasters needs to be removed. As I have not electric power onsite all the work needs to be done by hand. So I chose to remove at first the plaster up to 1.30 meter from the ground.After 6 hours of work I managed to complete the first wall.

Before:After:

The stones stick together with a clay rich soil with some hair (probably from goats) and a little of straw. The soil was covered with a second mix of the same soil and lime but it was not recovering completely the stones. On top, to layers of cement plaster. A first very thin one and a second much thicker.