The design: two units divided by a wall. To be built with adobe bricks A sample brick made ready for the drop test... and, it survived. So our soil is good for making sun dried bricks. A mud house must have a good plinth to keep its feet dry. Rocks at the site to be broken... with these steel drifts driven into holes along fault lines.. and tapped in. Voila, a clean break! And a we had a good collection Soil was dug out for brick making... and carried away in head loads It was watered and stomped, and stomped with breaks to say phew This pile took 4 of us 3 hours in all, to turn from soil into a dough. It will make 40 bricks .And, we needed 2,000 These brick moulds were dusted off the shelf. And off we went. A team of 5 working in 90 min sessions. We got into a good rhythm but needed to scale up to score 2,000 bricks. So to scale up we needed more stomping legs Ravi and his two strong bullocks came to the party. There were bonus drops of bull-shit into the mix Things speeded up. We made the 2000 in about 7 weeks. Foundation lines were marked out. and dug with our mini excavator. And we were ready to call in the stone mason. He began with a pooja in an auspicious moment. The trench depth turned out excessive and called for a lot of rocks We needed smaller rocks to fill niches and we foraged for them from nearby fields The plinth rose 1.5ft above ground. It was backfilled with soil excavated while trenching We began stacking bricks close to be at hand for the masonry team Soil was sieved through a wide mesh and mixed just enough to flow: that was mud mortar to glue bricks. No cement. Bricks being large, the walls came up quickly. Doors and windows were discards from old buildings They were placed and propped vertical till they set Front gable wall with doors of the two units Gable wall's crowning moment. The brickwork was done surprisingly quickly. As the structure awaited its roof, rains came down instead one April night scampering us to action stations. The morning after saw roofing sheets placed loose on the structure and tarps laid to protect the ridge After the rain break: Half mm. corrugated galvanised iron sheets were laid on 50mm steel pipes. Sheets were held down by J-bolts fitted with bitumen gaskets under a cup washer Bitumen sheet was rolled out on the corrugated sheets and tiles salvaged from old homes Bitumen sheet is meant to provide some grip to the tiles. The tiles are to cut heat impact on the roofing and to prevent drumming when it rains And oh yes, to make the roof and the house look pretty as well Here's the roof all laid out and done We tried many recipes to decide on a natural plaster, that would be smooth, not flake and take some splash. The winner: finely sieved soil and cow-dung with just 5% cement, We used this for inner and outer plaster and the rammed floor as well. It mixed to an inviting mousse-like consistency Everyone loved hand applying it after damping the wall just a bit. It was pressed it and smoothed out. We had a good finish. Neither did it scour easily when splashed. We had a smooth finish. It would be coated with two layers of cowdung slurry to make the plaster fast. Rains at night again and tarps came on. But one exposed wall took the strong rain and survived to tell us our plaster recipe works! Views of the house: the front, facing north. Side: windows in the bedroom and port in the living Rear of the house with bedroom windows, facing south. This is Rajendran, master mason and leader of the local team of seven that did the skilled work for us. Rajendran and his team from the village, that built the house.