Advantages of adobe houses. How to finish the walls inside an adobe house What is the best way to finish the interior walls of adobe
Decorating the walls of an adobe house is an unlimited scope for creativity and the implementation of creative ideas, as well as the opportunity to create an environmentally friendly housing to your taste. The main thing when choosing finishing options is to maintain a favorable microclimate of an eco-house, take into account the recommendations of specialists in the choice of materials and strictly follow the installation technology.
Pise construction is the best solution for those who value energy-efficient and health-friendly technologies. And although adobe is not an innovation in construction, the quality and performance characteristics of the material have turned the ancient technique of building cheap housing into a technology of the 21st century. The main advantages of a house made of adobe - a mixture of sand, clay, water and straw: heat capacity, reliability, positive effect on the human body, healing properties, durability ( hundreds of years), natural moisture exchange. An additional "plus" is the unique exoticism of an adobe house and the ability to implement any design passages in the interior.
Decorating the walls of an adobe house: features of the choice of materials
Saman is a 100% safe for health material that creates a favorable microclimate in the room. Particularly useful in the composition of adobe radium, which helps to remove from the human body everything that decomposes, rots and leads to cellular disorganization. In addition, radium has a positive effect on the nervous system - that is why the ancestors living in clay houses did not complain about their health. Therefore, the main thing when choosing materials is to preserve the healthy, unique and healing microclimate of an eco-house.
General principles for choosing materials:
- Wall decoration from the inside of an adobe house performs only decorative functions - the enclosing structures DO NOT NEED to be protected! Therefore, when choosing materials, it is enough to pay attention to environmental friendliness, vapor permeability and aesthetic characteristics.
- The best finishing option is with a small layer of adobe and with natural dye. When choosing dyes, it is recommended to give preference to mineral ones based on metal oxides - resistant compounds that retain the brightness of paints well throughout the entire service life.
Important! It is not allowed to use in the interior decoration of an adobe house cement, modern latex and water dispersion paints! The latter are undesirable for two reasons: 1) insufficient vapor permeability; 2) the presence of polluting processes that are used in production.
Modern manufacturers offer a wide range of shades of mineral dyes, which provides talented designers with unlimited scope for the implementation of original ideas. A good solution for decorating the interior is a combination of painting the walls and.
- The easiest finishing option is: prime the walls with highly diluted glue, let dry and glue the material sheets.
- All types of plasters, including gypsum, are suitable for finishing an adobe house. Textured “antique” plaster looks bewitching, which emphasizes the effect of adobe walls - this is not only an opportunity to please the eye with a rough texture and give yourself a pleasant tactile sensation, but also a proven way to recreate the cozy atmosphere of a rural house with excellent sound-absorbing properties.
From the point of view of preserving the unique microclimate of an adobe house, it is undesirable, since the GKL sheets create an insulating air gap that prevents the walls from accumulating heat and warming up from the inside. Therefore, due to the loose adjoining of drywall to curved building envelopes made of adobe, freezing of the walls is possible.
When decorating the walls of an adobe house, special attention should be paid to amateurs. The easiest way is to stick the lining on the clay mortar - a short-lived option, as the tile will fall off over time. Therefore, experts recommend using this type of finish in rooms where it is difficult to do without cladding ( bathroom, toilet, kitchen).
If it fits well into the interior and is considered as the main type of finish, then the best solution would be to use drywall. First, you need to fasten the GKL sheets directly to the walls using long self-tapping screws, or pre-make a frame from galvanized profiles, and then fix drywall to it. After that, prepare the surface, perform ceramic tiling - and a beautiful wall will please the eye with a spectacular view of a stylish finish.
Building a house is an expensive undertaking. Building materials alone for the construction of walls will cost a serious amount, but you still need to attract craftsmen for their masonry and decoration. Yes, with all the expenses for high-quality construction and finishing materials, you still need to make sure of their environmental performance - you must admit, this criterion is important today. Meanwhile, a full-fledged house can be built not only with your own hands, but also from structural material, created, again, independently and right on the construction site - no chemical components are required for the production of adobe bricks. Let's find out what adobe is, how to build a building from it and, finally, how comfortable it will be to live in such a house.
History of adobe houses
To shelter himself and his family from the weather, a man needed a house. Several millennia ago, people developed various construction technologies, primarily dependent on the availability of the simplest building materials - stone and wood. For many peoples who inhabited the Earth around the perimeter of the equator before our era, wood and stone were in great short supply, they had to look for other building materials. About 6,000 years ago, a solution to the problem was found - bricks were created from wet clay mixed with straw, dried in the sun, and buildings were erected from this simple structural material.
For the first time, bricks molded and fired in the sun appeared in Ancient Egypt - for their production, Egyptian builders extracted clay from the bottom of the Nile River. Subsequently, the technology for creating clay bricks was borrowed from the Egyptians by the peoples of Ancient Persia, from where it spread throughout Asia, and then, together with the Moorish armies, penetrated into Spain. By the way, it was the Arab builders who gave the clay brick the name at-tob, which was changed centuries later by the Spaniards to adobe - its Turkic name "saman" is better known in Russia.
Until 2003, the oldest architectural complex in Asia, made entirely of adobe, was the Persian "Bam fortress" (Arg-e Bam), created around the 6th-4th centuries BC. e. the Achaemenid dynasty. Unfortunately, at the end of 2003, the ancient Citadel was completely destroyed by a 6.3 magnitude earthquake, the epicenter of which fell almost on the territory of the old city. It should be noted that the Iranian city of Bam suffered from the earthquake not only in the historical part, but also in the modern one - about 80% of the buildings collapsed.
The construction of buildings from mud (i.e. clay) developed independently among the peoples of the American continent. The Anasazi (Pueblo) Indians erected multi-story clay and straw complexes in the southern part of North America, although they did not make bricks - the prepared building material was wetted along the perimeter of the future building, as it hardened, a new tier was formed on top, and so on. .
In the state of New Mexico (USA), buildings built from adobe about 1000 years ago still exist and are used for living.
Composition of adobe
Cob blocks are made exclusively from natural materials without the use of any chemicals. These are mixed clay, sand, straw and water, which are the main substances. And additional ingredients that are added if necessary include: tyrsa, wood chips or wood chips, sometimes fresh cow dung is used.
The walls of the house made of adobe are famous for their energy saving and comparative cheapness. Most owners of houses made of adobe have appreciated the advantages of this natural building material: in summer, the house keeps cool, heating up from the outside, and in winter it keeps warm, being exposed to sub-zero temperatures. Such an advantage is unlikely to be found in the properties of cinder blocks or bricks.
However, the disadvantage of an adobe house, as already mentioned, lies precisely in its sensitivity to water and moisture, which is why it is so important to find the right solution for reliable and at the same time environmentally friendly cladding of its walls.
There are several options for finishing adobe houses from the outside:
Siding and composite sheathing;
- overlaying the house with stone;
- tiling;
- plaster coating with subsequent painting with facade paint;
- fur coat finish.
Fans of modern trends in the exterior of adobe houses come to the decision to use siding, often forgetting about the harmfulness of certain types of plastic. Typically, siding attracts with its practicality in operation and hermetic protection against moisture and dampness of coatings. Although such a sheathing of an adobe house is made using the technology of ventilated facades, plastic heated in the sun can still emit harmful substances that eat into the walls. Most do not consider this moment to be a fact, however, in any case, if we compare living natural material and synthetic material, the advantage in safety for human health will still be given to environmentally friendly natural building materials.
Overlaying an adobe house with stone is considered an environmentally acceptable way to protect such a house from moisture, but it is not affordable for everyone. Often, a stone means the use of such materials: wild stone, artificial stone, shell rock, sandstone. The stone also has the natural ability to "breathe", while allowing the cob blocks to "live and breathe" as well.
Tiled ceramic cladding, although more laborious to work with and less durable, but also, like stone, belongs to environmentally friendly materials. But there is one "but" - this is tile adhesive for outdoor use, which just can be quite toxic. Therefore, in order to achieve greater harmlessness, cement mortars, or anchor or wire fixtures and fasteners are used in the decoration of external adobe walls.
Plastering adobe walls with subsequent painting is a very environmentally friendly way to clad your home. Plastering must be done using a special plaster mesh, which must first be fixed on fragile walls. Many insulate walls using various insulation materials, such as special foam. Plaster is applied on top and after it dries, the walls are painted with facade paint. Environmental friendliness and durability of such a coating are guaranteed!
Finishing an adobe house outside “under a fur coat” is also classified as a safe cladding method. In addition, this method is considered quite economical and affordable in terms of the cost of building materials for a “fur coat”. The house is also well protected from moisture, and at the same time allows the adobe material to "breathe".
Thus, we see that four of the proposed five methods are the safest in order to veneer and protect the walls of an adobe house from moisture and other undesirable influences.
Good afternoon! I like your site, it has so much useful information. But still I would like to ask. Our house is adobe, it was inherited, it has uneven walls and we don’t know how to level them, we don’t want to work with clay, it’s not practical, and it’s already the 21st century in the yard, I know that adobe is a natural material and it’s only friends with natural materials.
So my husband and I decided to sheathe the walls with wood inside. But we were told that it is not advisable to make holes in the adobe, even small ones. Please tell us what should we do? If it is possible to sheathe with wood, then what should be followed and what technology is there? Thank you.
Elena, Ukraine, Dnepropetrovsk.
Hello Elena from Dnepropetrovsk!
In general, adobe houses, by and large, do not imply any further finishing, both outside and inside.
Everything is done right at the construction stage. That is, they planned to build a house from adobe, which is usually dictated by the large availability of cheap material near the construction site (primarily clay) and are built immediately with plaster walls from the same material composition as the main walls of the house.
Alignment of the surface of the walls is carried out immediately at the construction stage. And in the future, only cosmetic repairs and whitewashing are carried out, both outside and inside the house. This is a traditional method developed over the centuries.
And the look of such walls is considered a certain charm, a kind of retro style. It happens, however, that for greater importance, from the inside, natural boulders are added on the surface of a couple of walls, which are immured with the same plaster and metal fittings for better retention.
All kinds of lining and wall decoration of adobe houses outside with bricks, blocks and similar materials are considered not quite the right solution for a number of reasons. As well as from the inside with the same drywall, not to mention hardboard, plywood and even lining.
If you absolutely want to sheathe uneven walls from the inside with wood, then most likely this should be done with clapboard on a wooden frame. / A metal profile as a frame is not suitable - then the lining cannot be nailed with nails. /
Currently, there is a controversy regarding the presence of a dew point at the boundary of contact between dissimilar materials (in this case, adobe walls and wood of the frame itself or the lining surface).
That is, to put it simply, due to the temperature difference outside the house and inside it, humidity can occur in a certain place of the thickness of the walls with all the ensuing consequences. Good, when this border is in the thickness of the adobe walls. But if it falls on the inner surface of these walls or on the surface of wooden elements, then moisture begins to settle at certain moments in the form of condensate. What is not good.
In most cases, in adobe houses, the mentioned border is located inside the walls and nothing inside the house is visually noticeable, but, unfortunately, this is not always the case.
In short, if your house has never, under any temperature cataclysms, previously had moisture on the inner walls, then everything is fine. If this happened, then there may be problems with the installation of wooden sheathing.
I hope I didn’t completely intimidate you with excursions into thermodynamics?
And lining lining is made as follows. They take a wooden cranial bar with a section of about 20 * 40 millimeters. Apply it with the flat side (not on the edge!) To the surface of the adobe walls and set them on a level. If necessary, in those places of the walls where there are large dips, put pieces of plywood of the required thickness to eliminate these dips-deflections. So that a set of such several different-thickness pieces of plywood does not crumble, they are fastened together with galvanized carnations.
In this case, the lining can be installed in two ways.
The first is vertical. Then the cranial bar is attached to the walls horizontally and in about four belts. The first and fourth are directly at the floor and ceiling. The other two are at a symmetrical distance along the height of the walls.
The second option is horizontal. Then the cranial bar is installed horizontally with a step (the size between the bars) of about 0.6 meters.
/Around the openings of windows and doors, the beam is mounted around their entire perimeter, and the slopes are then closed with decorative strips or a wooden corner. Other options are possible./
Wooden surfaces are treated with antiseptic compounds. Bruskov - from all sides. Lining - only from the inside, the one that will be facing the surface of the adobe walls. This is due to the fact that in the future you will most likely cover the surface of the walls from the lining with some kind of dye (Pinotex, Aquatex, Texturol, Pokrovite, or something else from one and a half to two dozen similar compositions). But not all of these dyes are compatible with antiseptic formulations.
In case of incompatibility, after some time, peeling or peeling of subsequent overlays occurs. And if the surface of the lining facing the inside of the premises is not covered with anything, then there will be no rejections.
The fastening of the cranial bars is usually carried out using black wood screws. Bars are attached to the walls with a distance between fasteners of about half a meter - about a meter. The length of self-tapping screws used in adobe walls ranges from 50 to 100 millimeters.
Self-tapping screws can be complete with plastic dowels. It all depends on the density of the wall material and the presence of wooden elements in them. The main idea is to keep your cranial framing from falling off. And this is achieved by several methods and only experimentally and for each house strictly individually. There are no completely identical adobe houses, because they were built and are being built more and more "by eye", the builders, that is, the owners, put completely different amounts of clay, fires, etc. into the adobe, and therefore the characteristics of the material of the walls are different.
So, even in walls made only of adobe, there are still wooden elements that are on top (strapping or edging timber), the floor is also wooden, and the cranial timber is attached to it. And there is also wood around the windows and doors. That is, in all places where there is a tree, one should try to attach a cranial bar. At the same time, self-tapping screws here can be used of a shorter length (than 75 - 100 millimeters, which are attached to adobe walls).
In addition, in the corners of the house, the bars located along the mating walls are attached to each other (at 90 degrees), which creates additional structural strength.
Your concerns about the fact that there will be small holes in the adobe. Well, firstly, not through holes, but recesses for self-tapping screws by several centimeters. With a thickness of adobe walls, which can be several tens of centimeters, this is not fatal. Yes, and consider the area of \u200b\u200bsuch holes yourself compared to the total area of \u200b\u200bthe walls. These are ten-thousandths of a percent of everything. Theoretically, these are, of course, "cold bridges", but in practice, as mathematicians say, their value is negligible and can be neglected.
For fastening themselves to a wooden frame-crate, galvanized lining (finish) nails 40 millimeters long are used.
There is no unequivocal opinion on the use of various thermal films between adobe walls and wood. Some specialists claim that they are mandatory, others - just the opposite.
I like the second one more. It is in the case of adobe walls. In other variations, this may not be the case.
The most correct decision for you would consider this - to make one room according to the recommended one. If everything is ok, that is, “okay”, then next year do everything exactly the same in all other rooms with uneven walls. Because as soon as time shows the correctness of our decisions.
All. Good luck!
Other questions on the topic of adobe houses.
Building an adobe house is part of the philosophy of an eco-friendly and economical lifestyle. There is always a good microclimate here, adobe is able to absorb excess moisture from the air and, if necessary, can give it back. This material is cheaper than other wall solutions (brick, wood, modern blocks), and you can make it yourself. The building has good heat and sound insulation.
The owners of adobe houses are proud of the originality of their homes, the expressiveness and originality of their interiors. And this, perhaps, is the main attraction of adobe construction.
From plastic material, you can make rounded walls, arches, benches and beds. Right in the walls, you can make shelves, window openings of various shapes, for example, with rounded corners. Moreover, window panes can be embedded directly into the wall, without a frame.
Even children can take part in creating the interior, only time and imagination are needed. Creativity captures, and, having mastered the technology, some do not stop at the construction of one building: they plan to build a workshop, a garage, a house for guests or parents from adobe.
In the decoration of adobe houses, natural materials are used (clay, lime or gypsum plaster on the walls, wood and ceramics on the floor). Ovens are often used for heating and cooking (the simple and economical Kuznetsov stove is especially popular).
But there are no obstacles to equipping an adobe house with modern engineering equipment, supplying gas to it, connecting an electric or gas boiler. An effective solution, given the massiveness of heavy adobe and its ability to accumulate heat, will be the "warm floor" system. Engineering communications are easy to hide in the floor and walls.
You can use completely eco-friendly drywall sheets, acrylic plaster and paint to finish the latter. It is good to treat wooden structures with modern protective impregnations. The combination of ancient adobe building methods with modern technology enhances comfort in the home.
The need for ventilation
You need to understand that adobe absorbs moisture well (much more than brick, and about the same as aerated concrete). A heavily wet wall can suddenly collapse (such are the properties of clay).
Therefore, the house must have good ventilation to prevent saturation of the walls with water vapor. Ventilation ducts must be provided in the walls. Since adobe technology allows you to wall up windows directly into the wall, without a frame, but it will be impossible to open them.