DIY adobe house repair

Hello Semyonitch! It so happened that I and my two children bought an adobe house in the Adygea and moved. The house is in dire need of repairs, help and even advice, there is no one to expect from here, and even strained with finances. I decided with my sons (13 and 14 years old) to repair it myself, but, of course, there is no necessary knowledge. Please help us, Semyonitch! We removed the floor, decided to cover it with gravel, make a screed on top, then a warm water floor and tiles. I would like to make the ceilings a little higher, so we cover the foundation with gravel, and we want to remove the logs on which the floorboards lay, but I cannot understand if they still perform some function in this house.

Regards, Irina, x. Tikhonov.

You are a risky woman, but risk is a noble cause.

If your sons help you, you can do it and they can make great men.

The construction of an adobe house is an exotic affair, albeit labor-intensive. But the ecology will be at its best. Don't just add organic matter to adobe. The British, unlike our southern neighbors, do not do this either. Clay, straw, sand, water, casting molds and your work, that's enough.

Since you have access to the Internet, in the relevant sections on the construction of adobe houses, you may well find answers to most of your questions.

Therefore, I see no point in expanding on this topic in detail.

As for the genital lags, they most likely served as the basis of the floor. Clear space around one of them to make sure how they were secured and what they supported. Most often, logs are walled up (embedded) into the walls of the house and rest on posts made of stone (brick, concrete, rubble, etc.).

Video (click to play).

Accordingly, the logs are treated with bioprotective compounds against rot and all kinds of bugs. And they also have waterproofing, that is, roofing material (or rubemast, stekloizol or their analogs) is placed on the posts under the logs. And in the places of the bookmarks in the walls, they are also wrapped in a couple of layers with them.

Just take out the logs and put a layer of gravel instead of the floor? In the old days, they did it. And not only gravel was used. And just ordinary land was well rammed and lived like that.

If everything is done correctly, according to appropriate construction technologies, then the floor should rest on a reliable foundation. That is, on the mentioned support posts. Otherwise, the floor may move, especially the tiled one. With a possible violation of the pipes used for the installation of warm water floors.

Therefore, it is necessary to find these supports, if any. Make them if they are not there. As a last resort, make sure that your gravel layer will not move anywhere and will not sink. Then make a concrete screed with a thickness of at least 50 millimeters with reinforcement with reinforcement or welded mesh.

Try to bring the ends of the welded mesh cards into the walls of the house by heels of centimeters. The mesh should cover the entire floor surface. Individual mesh cards must be tied together with knitting wire. It is enough to take its diameter of 1 or 1.5 millimeters. It is sold in bays.

/ A welded mesh map is a rectangle made of wire with a diameter of one and a half, two millimeters, up to 4 - 5, superimposed on each other in the form of rectangles or squares and welded together. /

The sequence of operations is pouring a 2.5 centimeters layer of concrete, then laying the mesh, then pouring another 2.5 centimeters of concrete again.

Then you will have a solid base both for laying floor tiles and for laying water pipes when installing a warm floor. And also the installation of furniture and everything else.No risk of breaking the floor.

This is roughly the shortest answer to your question.

Yes, don't forget to make sure there is no basement under your house! So that, God forbid, the whole screed does not fall into it with all your labors.

Other questions about adobe houses:

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If you own an old adobe house, do not despair, because, in principle, there is nothing wrong with the restoration. Knowing how to put everything in order, you can repair an old adobe house on your own and without problems. In fact, an adobe house is a building made of clay, that is, unbaked raw bricks, which, if possible, were lined with ordinary bricks around the perimeter.

Like any repair, it all starts with an inspection of the building, drawing up a work plan, an estimate and the purchase of the necessary materials. If you are not sure that you can carry out all the work on your own, then it is better, of course, to turn to qualified workers. The main elements of any residential building are the foundation, walls and roof, so let's look at everything in order.

In adobe buildings, the classical foundation was rarely used, that is, the walls of the house were erected on a compacted clay pillow. Or, in the version of an adobe structure, wooden pillars were driven into the ground, which were subsequently coated with clay. When inspecting the building, if you see the presence of cracks on the walls, the difference at the level of the window openings, then with a 100% guarantee we can say that the house has shrunk and the foundation needs to be repaired under the walls.

Option to strengthen the foundation of an adobe house

To do this, trenches are dug along the walls, but not in a continuous strip, but in increments of approximately one meter and a depth of about 0.6 m. Waterproofing is done along the lower edge of the adobe blocks. Sections of the foundation are laid in problem areas (the simplest option is reinforced concrete or sand-cement blocks). After that, it is imperative that waterproofing is done around the entire perimeter and a blind area is constructed.

One of the main problems of adobe walls is that a "belly" appears after a long time: irregularities and bulges appear on their surface. If such irregularities are up to two centimeters in size, you can try to clean them up, and when there are more, it is better not to take risks, but to think over a way to cover them (in the case of a facade, you can use siding, inside drywall).

Plastering adobe walls inside the house

During the construction of adobe houses, all floors were mainly made of wood. Therefore, it is necessary to assess the condition of the floor beams and if they are in a deplorable state, they need to be completely changed. Of course, this is a large amount of work, since you will have to disassemble the roof, replace the entire piping and make new wooden floors.

The roofs of such houses used to be covered with what was at hand: from reeds to ceramic tiles. When restoring an old roof, the first thing to start with is to inspect the entire wooden structure. If necessary, replace the worn-out elements and treat the entire crate, for example, with mastic.

Before starting roof repairs, it is necessary to carefully examine all its elements.

If the old roof is covered with tiles, it is advisable to replace it with a lighter material, since, having a lot of weight, it creates an undesirably large load on the entire structure of the house.

When deciding to carry out a complete renovation of a building in the first place, never neglect the advice of experts.Since, unknowingly, you can cause irreparable damage to the entire building, which ultimately affects your budget.

At the dacha we have an adobe house, it is warm, but the foundation is crumbling. How to properly repair an old foundation?

Any work on strengthening or repairing the foundation begins with its inspection, inspection can be carried out only when the foundation is “opened”, pits are dug out

It is also important at the initial stage to understand why your foundation is being destroyed.

Perhaps a repair of the blind area is needed, or a new blind area.

Perhaps your foundation is "tormented" by groundwater, you need drainage.

Only after these works (by the way, only specialists can do such work) can one begin to repair the foundation (if the relevance has not yet disappeared, sometimes the above measures are enough, it's not about the foundation).

In general, research work is needed "by eye" to repair the foundation is useless.

If the reason for the destruction of the foundation is that it is not correctly filled (above the freezing point), then the foundation can be insulated, perhaps this will help stop the destruction.

A trench is dug along the perimeter, but no deeper than the “bottom” of the foundation, then waterproofing (after cleaning the foundation from the ground), backfilling of insulation (expanded clay, for example), although it is possible with coarse sand, so the blind area with insulation is cheaper.

There are other methods of repair, with more severe destruction, the foundation is a very serious matter, it is rather difficult to describe all the methods (we do not even know what type of foundation we are talking about), one thing I can say is that without research (preliminary) without looking for the reasons that led it is highly undesirable to start repairing the foundation to destroy the foundation, this is a wasted time and money.

And finally, pouring a new one next to the old foundation, driving the reinforcement into the old one and “tying” it into one whole by pouring concrete, this is a useless task, you will get another foundation next to the old one and that's it.

Strengthening is carried out in sections, the old foundation is undermined, a solution is poured under it, in your case (adobe), these individual sections should be shortened, adobe is not a very durable material.

As you already understood, any of the above works cannot be done on your own (if the result is important).

In order to protect from the rain, houses made of wood or adobe (clay with chopped straw) are often sheathed with boards that rot intensively. And plastering a wall containing organic matter is not only useless, but also harmful. The coating cracks, the wall stops "breathing" and a fungus appears.

A more reliable solution is the use of modern plastic lining (PV), plus competent wall ventilation. You can even lay insulation.

Here is a diagram of such a design (Fig. 1). Air through the ventilation hatch penetrates into the space between the cladding and the wall (or insulation), rises up and exits near the roof. In this case, it is important that the ventilation gap is at least 1-2 cm.

The part adjacent to the ground (or blind areas) can be made of flat slate, depicting granite or tiled cladding with oil paint diluted with linseed oil (Fig. 2).

Why is PV best suited for these “dynamic” homes? Because it is not attached directly to the wall, but is installed using special brackets that allow the plastic to move, compensating for temperature changes and changes in the geometry of the building.

We cut slate sheets with a grinder. At the end adjacent to the lining, we form a chamfer so that the water flowing from the roof does not fall under the slate. We cut out the holes for the hatches, which should be located approximately in the middle between the installation beams.

As blanks, we use a neck with a lid d 33 mm from a plastic bottle (more, but not less).

We fix the hatch (fig. 3). On the inside, along the perimeter, apply a strip of silicone sealant. As a last resort - wrap with tow soaked in oil paint.We attach the slate sheets to the installation bar with hex head screws.

The easiest way is to install a plastic lining without insulation: we remove the boards, dissolve the highest quality boards on slats with the help of a circular. We fill them with a step of 50-60 cm. Next, we assemble the cladding using standard technology.

Of the insulation materials, rolled glass wool 120 × 5 cm is best suited.We cut the roll lengthwise into two equal parts.

Thus, the distance between the installation beams with a section of 7 × 7 cm will be 60 cm. We fasten the glass wool very carefully (Fig. 4) to avoid slipping, sagging and crumbling, which can lead to blocking of the ventilation duct.

Cover it from above with fiberglass facade plaster mesh and nail it down with plastic washers (cut from 4 × 4 cm baklashki). We put a copper wire under the washers, tying the canvas.

We nail plaster shingles in the center. Maintenance of the wall is very simple: in the spring we open the hatches so that it dries properly, and we close it for the winter.

It is impossible to use foam, pressed glass wool plates and mineral wool on aluminum foil for insulation - these are airtight coatings.

Hello.
I got an adobe house lined with bricks, now I will reconstruct and repair. This will be my first experience in repair and, accordingly, a lot of questions for experts.
House 1961-64
Rubble foundation 60 cm thick, deepening up to about 150 cm.
Load-bearing walls are 37-40 cm thick, excluding bricks.

The first question is, from the outside there is a crack over the window opening, how to fix it? My assumptions are to weld the frame from the corner and, when replacing the window frame, simply insert it from the inside, thereby expanding and raising the upper joint of the bricks.

Secondly, there was a crack at the junction of the extension to the house, the foundation of the extension was also but, but according to a visual inspection from the inside of the basement (basement under the house), it is shittyly complicated, at least not like that of the house, and from the outside it is clear that the corner has subsided.
The crack thickness at the base is 5-8 mm.
What to do with this case? How to fix it correctly and for a long time?
Of course, there is an idea to demolish this extension to hell and rebuild it, but for now this is a last resort.

There is also a small crack in one upper corner of the house.

And the most important question, there is a desire to remove the roof and put a frame attic floor from some relatively light material. It is clear that this question cannot be answered so simply, but at least advise which specialists to start with. Who can calculate all this?

Quite often we are asked about our house plaster and wall covering (inside and outside). I will try to tell you a little more about plastering an adobe house in this article.

Let's remember the spring of 2014. The house is finally finished, the adobe walls are dry, the wheat sprouts on the walls are withered - you can start finishing.

I must say that the walls, erected using the technology of light adobe, are quite breathable. This is especially felt during strong winds)) The first winter, while the walls were drying, we felt it in full. And in the spring, as soon as it got warmer, they started plastering the walls. We already had experience in using clay plaster, and clay is at hand, so we did not think long about choosing a plaster mixture.

Raindrops on the wall. At first, the walls staunchly resisted the weather.

ADVANTAGES OF CLAY PLASTER: availability and low cost - the material, one might say, lies right under your feet, environmental friendliness, hypoallergenicity, fire safety. Absorbs unpleasant odors, allows walls to "breathe". Can be used as a finishing material.

THE COMPOSITION OF THE MIXTURE is simple - it is clay, sand and water. I also added some plaster. It allows you to adjust the shade of the plaster mixture - making it lighter. And with it the solution dries faster.

Applying a rough plaster layer. Clay sticks to death.You can then tear it off only with a piece of the wall.

The proportions of sand and clay are selected depending on the "fat content" of the clay, and its composition may differ even in two adjacent areas. If plastering with oily clay, i.e. with a small admixture of sand - the plaster will crack when it dries. If the solution is "skinny", i.e. too much sand - the plaster will turn out to be loose and loose.
A lot has been written on the Internet how to determine the fat content of clay - by rolling balls or sausages, but there are no clear recommendations on how much sand to add in the end, so I immediately experimented on the wall. The result is a 1x2.5 ratio (one bucket of clay and two and a half sand). Before that, in an old house in the city, we used a 1x4 mix for plaster. We add quite a bit of gypsum to the solution, somewhere - 1/8 of a bucket (the more, the lighter the solution). The clay can be pre-soaked in a container in which the solution is mixed, and diluted with water until a homogeneous consistency, without lumps. And then add sand.

Correct consistency. )) The mortar is not too thick, but it also does not run off the trowel.

If the clay is dry and crumbly, you can, by removing or crushing large lumps, immediately mix with sand and gypsum, and then add water. Then, after preparation, the solution should be allowed to stand for a while so that all clay particles are soaked.

The mixture is diluted with water to the consistency of "thick sour cream". We applied the rough layer directly to the adobe wall, i.e., to put it mildly, on a non-smooth surface, and made the solution thinner - this way it better penetrates into all cavities, cracks and, when dry, adheres very firmly to the wall, and for the finishing layer it is more convenient make a thicker solution.

Smoothing the unevenness of the plaster walls. In a simple way - with a wet sponge. )) Only a sponge is needed dense, tough.

To prevent the finished wall from crumbling, crumbling or eroding when water gets in, we fixed it with a primer. They managed to try different primers from different manufacturers - acrylic, latex, concentrate, and ready-made solutions. In my opinion, there is no difference. Not a single crack has formed on the walls during the operation, it does not crumble anywhere, does not exfoliate. When water hits the walls, it rolls down and is not absorbed. By the way, the stones with which we faced the walls in the kitchen were attached to the same mortar of clay and sand. So far none have bounced)))