Chantier collectif

Our Architect is building a house in Bagnere (our nearest town), he is having various 'Chantier collectif' (collective building work) sessions where people help him and he will help them back. Apparently there are many such works in the local area. We agreed to help because he is using various eco insulations and finishes that we are interested to learn about.
Today was straw and earth insulation (and the rest of this week and next week - we may do another day next week too so we can see how it is getting on).
We spent the morning dunking straw in to watery mud (or muddy water depending how you look at it). 5 buckets of mud (washed from stones in the local quarry) and 8 buckets of water was the recipe in this case, it depends on your mud how much water you want. Apparently you want the resulting mixture just to stick to your hand if you dip it in, making a 'glove of mud' and when you coat the straw you don't want it to be too muddy, just a thin coating of mud. The insulation won't be very good if there is too much mud/clay in the mix. We were told some stuff about telling how clay-y the muddy mix is too.

The house and garden

The mud and water mixing station

The covering mud in straw station

In the afternoon we swapped over and moved on to installing the straw in to the walls. Unfortunately I didn't get a photo of this as I kept getting distracted by peacocks every time I got the camera out. They were very loud, if I lived there they might suffer some kind of tragic accident.

Basically we were filling in the holes in a timber frame wall with the wet muddy straw. Planks are screwed to the front of the frame while you pack the straw in and removed afterwards leaving the straw filling behind. This will eventually be plastered with earthen plaster. It was hard work as it had to be really packed down so it doesn't settle with time leaving a gap at the top of every section.
Despite the effort involved, we enjoyed it, as it was a chance to meet some new people (French and British) as well as rule out one type of insulation for our house! Far to labor intensive. The five of us probably did 2 feet up one rather small wall in the whole day - although we did make much more of the muddy straw than we used.