With frozen fingers and hair crackling with ice, ten kids from the Antwerp Steiner School and I powered up the industrial mixer and poured kilo after kilo of lime, hemp-shiv, water and kaolin powder into it. A pack and a half of hemp to one bag of pure hydrated lime (30kilos) to about a kilo and a half of kaolin mixed with 35 litres of water makes 8 tubs worth of perfect hempcrete in about 4 minutes. This needed to be hauled upstairs and tamped by hand into the wooden forms. Our mixer was working solidly from 9am to 3pm. As your starter for 10- how many tubs did we haul?
By the end of the day, I'd developed quite a crush on a teenager, my knuckles were swollen, I'd fallen down the last rungs of the ladder twice, torn my trousers, cut my leg, my nails were cracked, I had shiv in my eyes and I'd accidently punched a few errant screws in the walls when tamping more than once so it's taken all week for my hands to recover and get back to typing. The house looked brilliant when it was finished though and I wasn't the only clumsy one! I also met my friend Steffi, she's a student at the Steiner school and we worked together in Vermont. It was really fantastic to see her again.
Monday night I stayed over at Peter Vos's house and talked about intelligent architectural things, had a blissfully hot shower and played monopoly the Euro version (I bought Schiphol Airport and Latvia for a bargain €160!)
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