How to build a wattle and daub wall | natural building

Wattle and daub is my favorite natural building technique and in this video I'm going to show you how we make it step by step from making the frame, adding the bits of wood, the wattle, to the frame, stuffing insulation in from materials from the land and then the various ways we get the plaster onto the wattle. We have a finished wall and I will also show you how we incorporate a little bit of art using beer bottles in the wall to make it look a little bit funky and let light in. So please enjoy this video and don't forget to subscribe. The very first step that we have to do is build the roof so we have a frame to work from. If there is no roof because it's an internal wall then we need to build the structure to build the wattle and daub wall onto. In this example we've built a roof and we've got these telegraph poles which hold the roof together and that gives us a place to work outside of the rain, outside of the sun and this gives us a base to install our wattle and daub wall onto. So these have been put in to the ground really deep and then we'll have these to hold onto the wall. The wall will be made out of clay which absorbs a lot of moisture and we don't want moisture coming up into a wall and destroying it and causing damp so we have to make a moisture barrier underneath the wattle and daub wall. So this is so that groundwater and water sitting on the surface of the soil outside the wall doesn't penetrate the wall. So what we have to do is build a small wall or something that doesn't allow moisture to move up. The main options are really stone which is what we have in abundance here, earth bags or a block of cement. For this wall I'm going to use stone and what I like to do first is dig a little ditch underground to get to the more solid the solid ground but because this foundation isn't really holding up anything it doesn't have to be so deep. We can then backfill the ditch with gravel and then build our stone wall on top or we can start the stone wall underground as we are going to do here. So now what we've done is we've put some posts in the middle of the walls and this gives us something to screw the wattle to because the frame for the roof is too far apart so we've put this piece of wood in the middle and then we can have shorter bits of wattle. The length from here to here, the smaller this length is the more straight all the wood would be so it makes a straighter wall but there's then going to be more sections if you have more of these and then if there's more sections you have to do a lot more nailing of the wattle. So we're trying to find a balance between minimum work and getting a nice straight wall so I think this gap is just about right. The next stage is to put the wattle across all the way up the wall and what we want to do is try and make a flat wall so any bends in the wattle should go up and down not in and out otherwise you end up with a bumpy wall it's harder to plaster and no space to stuff the light earth in. When nailing these on it's much easier to do it with a nail gun because you have a nice thin nail and it's super fast we used to do it with a hammer and nail and that took a lot longer but either way it's much easier to do with the wattle if it is green because it's more flexible to bend into position and it's softer so it's easier for the nail to go through. So once we put this all on one side we can put it over onto the other side so we put the wattle on this side and then we stuff that with the light earth we need to stuff it really well so it's quite solid. Light earth is simply a mix of clay with straw but it's not very heavy dense clay it's kind of like clay that's just basically water mixed with a bit of clay so that the clay breaks down and melts and it becomes like a soup mixture. We take soaked straw and then put that into a bucket and then we pour on the soup mixture and basically that makes it easy to mix. We then tip that into a wheelbarrow where we mix it by hand to try and get a little bit of wet clay to every strand of straw and then once that's done what we do is take it out the wheelbarrow let it drip dry a little bit and then we can use that light earth in the wall or you can make bricks with it but this is a great material because if you just use clay it'll be too heavy and use too much clay and it will have no insulation whereas the light earth stuffs into all the little corners and because of all the air gaps it has in it it will be a great insulation but on top of that it makes it really easy to plaster on afterwards. You don't always have to put the wattle on both sides and stuff it with light earth. I call that double wattle and dog but that's the best way because it has insulation and this light earth makes it easier for plastering. On this wall we're going to put these right next to each other only on one side so there won't be any space anywhere to stuff in the middle and that makes it harder to plaster the wall much thinner and no insulation. The double wattle and dog creates a lot more insulation. Once we've put the wattle on both sides and stuffed it all with the light earth it's quite good to just paint the straw with some clay and we're not trying to cover the straw with clay we're trying to get the bits of clay in between the strands of straw further back and as that dries it gives somewhere for us to put more clay to bind to. Clay doesn't bind so well to straw or wood so by getting more clay in between the strands of straw it's going to be easier to plaster. The next stage when this is dried a little bit is we're going to fill the gaps up to the edges of the wood with a slightly drier mix of plaster of clay and we're going to do that between all of these posts. Once that's actually been done and dried we can cover the whole wall with clay and we can even go and join that between all the bottles and everything to make it look like one continuous wall. To get a nice thick layer on you want a nice sticky mix and for that you want it to be a little bit too wet in the cement mixer and mix for about 30 minutes and what would actually happen is it will become really sticky and start to fold over in there like dough and then you can go really thick on the wall to get a nice smooth coat and as long as you did the last layers properly it will stick on really really well. We placed these bottles in the wall last year for this side and now we're trying to recreate that on this side and the way we did it is we made this wooden frame and then we covered it on chicken wire on both sides which held together the bottles. We had to tie the bottles up with some wire and then we nailed some mimosa around everywhere and the combination of the mimosa and the chicken wire will help hold the clay in place. We have to put quite a thick mix and slowly build it up to get this all full of clay inside and then we'll plaster all the outside with clay, cut the wires and try and clean it up so it looks nice. And for the line of bottles that we have put in the wall here we are recreating it on this side and again we've made a frame where it can sit nicely on the frame and then we put some wattle at the top to hold it in place and then some wattle upwards to help us have somewhere to bind the clay in the inside. So you can see here we've started putting the clay in between the bottles and that's got to dry a bit and then we'll be able to cover this wood with some clay. For the single wattle and doll it's a little bit harder because there is big gaps between so this hasn't been done so well. You can see up here we use straighter bits of wood so it's done much better, it'll be easier to plaster. So it's really important to find the right bits of wood when harvesting from the trees or to have your posts closer together to get straighter pieces. This will be hard to plaster but whatever you can do it with clay it's very versatile. So the first thing to do is paint all the wood with clay and it dries that will be easier for the clay to then stick to the wood. So now we're going to go and just put a little bit clay between all the bits of wood and start to build up where there's bigger gaps and then we'll let that dry and we'll do put a little bit more on and we'll let that dry and then we'll cover the whole thing with clay. Thank you for watching this video on wattle and doll. If you enjoyed the video please subscribe as we will have more videos on various natural building techniques or you can join us here in Portugal and come and learn natural building with us in person and get your hands dirty.