Anyway. I was thinking more about housing. You could make clay bricks for a house, but that will take quite a while to get enough, so I suggest an alternative. Wattle and daub, been in use since the Copper age, somewhere we want to get you to in the next couple of weeks.
Before you begin, you'll need some tools:
- An axe (aka, a sharp rock)
- a hammer (aka, a heavy rock)
- A basket (I'll explain how to make one below). Use it haul all your smaller materials around
You also need the following materials:
- Twenty five 4ft long stakes, 3in wide, for your wall supports
- Twelve 10ft long stakes, 3in wide, for roof supports
- A lot of shorter, but sturdy sticks for bracing your roof supports
- A large number of long & thin sticks/vines for weaving
- Vast quantities of hay/straw for thatch and bulking your daub (made by cutting wild grasses and leaving them to dry)
- Clay, to bind your daub
- Dirt or sand, as aggregate for your daub
- Lots of vines, for rope
Finally, pick a large flat area you like the look of to build your house.
As you can see this is a serious undertaking, but once you're done you shouldn't have to worry about a new home for a long time. This will keep you warm and dry, give you space to keep your stuff, and will make you feel a little less helpless.
Let's begin. Sharpen one end of each of your stakes to make it easier to ram them into the ground, evenly spaced in a circle about 16 feet diameter. Remember to leave a gap for a doorway. If I've done my math right it should be about two feet between each post. You then want to take your thinner sticks/vines and weave them between the upright posts to make a fence like the image below. See how each strand goes in and out, opposite direction to the one above/below? You can actually use this same method to weave a basket as well.
Anyway! This is your wattle. You can leave it at that for now, and it'll keep some of the weather off of you, but as you can see by all the wholes, we ain't done yet. Now you need to make your daub. Mix equal parts clay, sand/dirt and add some hay to keep it together, thrn slap that onto your wattle wall, both inside and out, until it goes from that first picture through the left hand panel below, on to the right. Leave that to dry for a bit, and it'll be almost as good as a brick wall.
Now, we build the roof. Pick a clear space to assemble the skeleton of the roof. You'll want to take your twelve sticks and array them in a circle like the spokes of a wheel, then use your rope to bind them together in the middle, so that the center of your roof rises about five feet off the ground. Thanks to Pythagoras this should make your roof wide enough to cover your house with about half a foot of overhang. Now, use all your remaining sticks and rope to bind the main spoles together like a spier web, to make the roof nice and sturdy. You should test this by climbing on top of it, cos I'd much rather it broke on you here than after you've dragged it on top of your house.
Speaking of. You're gonna have to work those muscles to set your frame on top of your walls. They should've dried out by now. Dont worry, we're on the home stretch.
Now you're going to make bundles of your hay. By which I mean, get them all lined up, and grab enough to fill both hands comfortably. Get some more rope and tie it off in the middle. Now you have one bundle of thatch. You'll need quite a few. Start tying these to the outside of your roof frame, making sure the individual strands are pointing in the same direction as the spokes, and starting at the lowest point on the roof. This way later bundles will overlap, just like roof tiles. Your thatch is not going to look at wonderful as the pic below, but then you don't have straw that has undergone millenia of artificial selection.
After a lot of hard, honest graft, you'll end up with something that looks like this:
I bet you've never felt so accomplished in your whole life.
Oh yeah! I promised to tell you how to make a basket. Get a handful of thin sticks, of equal length, and make a circle, with the sticks as spokes, with the center of each stick at the center of your basket. Using the same weaving principle as for your walls, go back and forth through these to make your basket. You can adjust the angle of your spoke sticks to make various shapes in your basket, but that is basically it.
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Topic: Restarting Civilization from Scratch- With the Help of a Forum (SG) (Read 16165 times)