Let's go: Brick by brick and let's not forget the windows

We have finished the foundations, it has been tough days and weeks, but the construction is going on schedule, plus or minus a day! Before laying the first shard of bricks we placed waterproofing under the bricks and here again we are encountering the problem of construction taking place where it is taking place. That is to say, in an area where one doesn't pop into a building supply store where there are dozens of other realistic products to choose from, but there is one. Physically one type of thin strip waterproofing that is not realistic to even connect properly thermally to itself.

I mean, there's no heating or rolling to connect the individual pieces of insulation. And why did we want waterproofing at the junction of the vertical structures and the foundation slab in the first place? You may remember our video of the second test of our unfired bricks, it was about the absorption and resistance of the bricks in the presence of moisture. If the bricks were exposed to prolonged moisture, i.e. standing in water, their integrity was severely compromised. Where the brick had soaked in, it started to crumble after a while, and we wanted to avoid that.

Our project aims to provide training in the building trade and to give the local community the knowledge to build buildings that are of high quality and sustainable over time. Our work also involves ongoing familiarisation with the local conditions, after all it is probably clear that it is not like ours from pretty much every angle. The region of Zambia is not a very humid environment, it rains here during 3 months of the year and the course looks more like a shower than a full day of rain. However, we want to prevent problems from occurring in the first place, and the area of the first scarf is just tricky, it's hard to go back and correct mistakes in these places.

When the height of the window sill was reached by bricking up the windows on the site, we marked the spacing of the windows in the exterior walls and went on our way or so, praying that the wind wouldn't blow the markers away and we would successfully break the windows. As a result, we ran into a few missteps during the bricklaying process, and that was: each bricklayer adjusted the thickness of the joints between the bricks to suit himself, and so every now and then we had individual walls that didn't match in height; there were also places that we had to knock down and start over, and the local workers just needed to be checked once in a while, because that's what we want to teach the locals, which is how to make things with consideration of the consequences for future work. What we were worried about, however, was the exact verticality of the walls, which, surprisingly, we managed to manage beautifully, and it certainly helped that we had five professional masons helping us in the corners, who took turns on the site.

So let's recap where we stand:

We didn't kill anyone.

the walls are vertical

we have windows, so we didn't build a dungeon, which of course wasn't the plan.

the height fits too - so we're going for a reinforced concrete wreath!

Stay tuned and greetings from Kashitu!