The Owner-built Adobe House

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To protect your bricks from the weather, I recommend covering the piles with a piece of plywood, asphalt felt paper, or black plastic.

Also, as I mentioned earlier, it is important to build and store your bricks as near your building site as possible. You must move approximately 2 tons (907 kg.) of bricks for every 10 feet (3 m.) of wall. To move this much weight any distance will consume a tremendous amount of time and energy. My own bricks, stored 100 to 200 feet (30-70 m.) from the building site, required almost an hour's hauling time for every ten feet of finished wall.

As you get into production, you will soon learn how many bricks you can make in a day. The first day I began, two of us produced exactly twenty-five bricks. I soon discovered that brickmaking is not an exact science. It always takes several tries to "work out the bugs". In the beginning I couldn't get the mud to fill out the sides of my bricks, many bricks had too many cracks, and others sagged so badly when I pulled off the molds that they couldn't possibly be used. You will be able to iron out difficulties like these after a few working days.

I found two people working together could produce about 225 bricks a day. Alone, I could make 125 to 150. Since I estimated 5,000 bricks were required for my 2,700-square-foot (250 sq. m.) house — you need approximately 100 to 125 bricks for every 8 feet (2.4 m.) of wall — I figured on thirty-three to thirty-five working days to make all the bricks. If you have only weekends for brick production, 5,000 bricks will require many weekends to produce.

Although making bricks is hard physical work, there is a great deal of satisfaction in knowing that you produced every last brick yourself, and in some ways I was almost sorry to see the brickmaking part of building my adobe house come to an end.

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