Last weekend we visited the site on our mission to test the soils, hunt for materials, and work on logistics. We arrived at our site amazed to see all the work that had completed. Jaimie, an affiliate of Project Mercy, has taken a special interst in the project because he knows the Ramiez family personally. He has been dedicating personal time and money into our project. He had a pit dug for a cistern tank and begun the footing excavations for a new concrete masonry unit retaining wall. It appears that we will have to revise our site plan according to our new site.
After reviewing our modified site we broke out the shovels and got to work. Following instructions from the draft of a upcoming earth plasters book by our friends, Bill & Athena Steen. We began to conduct tests concerning the amounts of clay in our soil.
It appears that we have a decent mix. The topsoil contains the most clay and underlying soils contain more sand. We feel that with the help of a little lime our soil mix will be just right. We brought two buckets full of soil back home to test this hypothesis.
Pallets. We had another last minute idea to use pallets for the wall construction. Tijuana has an excess of pallets, being an industrial city with plenty of cargo shipping. It is already a common recycled building material, as one can see from some of the construction of the neighboring latrines and fences. The typical size is 40″x48″ which will fit in our structure if we sister studs to them at approximately 48″ on center. We are currently looking into cellulose insulation availability in Tijuana. When joined together the pallets appear to have significant strength and should be a timely asset to our construction schedule.
Fortunately there was a stack of used pallets at a neighboring home and we were able to lay a few out and join some together. Jaimie informed us that he has a friend who may be able to get us pallets from a warehouse he works at. We are hoping to get quality recycled pallets of the same size for our wall construction. We are currently working on finalizing the engineering, obtaining a materials estimate, logistics, and scrambling for funding.
