Alternative Building methods

Many people often ask about different building methods and I have agreed to post a few of them.

If we go back in time man lived in caves as there was plenty of food in an area, but as food was seasonal and animals moved man needed to move with the sources of food; as man learned to cultivate food he found that animals also ate his cultivated food and he could hunt them out of season and the first settlements sprang up, as these settlements sprang up man started fighting with others to get the most fertile land, and when these settlements became permanant man caught wild animals instead of hunting them, and bred them.

What materials did they use to build a settlelent and its structures? in a nutshell they used what they had available, timber, stones, clay, mud, grass, and anything available locally, this is the basis of what we can do for ourselves, we go back in time and use what we can source locally and often freely; and when tools came into existance man found he could knapp flint which made excellent knives and if he split a stick he could insert a piece of knapped flint into the split and bind the split with grass to make axes and they sould shave and shape wood with them. We also have to remember that most of the UK was covered in huge swathes of forests then and timber was in abundance and many large hills had huge rocks sliding down them which often broke as they rolled and made large stones, and man was observant and noticed many of them fractured in specific ways, man also realised items such as slate could be split into sheets fairly easily where it was available; and that many of the building materials we use today come from many of the traditional building materials of yesteryear.

Slate is still used as a roofing material, bricks are nothing more than fired clay, concretes and mortars are nothing more than mined and graded sands and gravels with specific sized grain sizes and specific stone or aggregate sizes, and all your timbers still come from trees which are milled to make baulks for joists and framing, slices which are bonded together for plywoods, wood chips which are soaked in glue for various strand boards, and planks which are sliced pieces of tree trunks or thicker branches.

Traditional buildings were often built straight onto the ground, today we would use a membrane or polythene as a damp proof course, so there is scope to mix modern technologies with traditional building techniques for a traditionally constructed building with many modern benefits.

Our ancestors used what they had, so can we.

Primitive technology


Modern technology

ive been thinking about this cement cloth that is being sold, how could it be done DIY ?
 Well look at the cement cloth , it is simply a 2 layers of fabric with cement sandwiched in between.
 Would burlap or even old sheets soaked in cement slurry and draped over a frame in layers work?
 It seems doable, just look at plaster casts when you break a bone .
 I cant find much about this on the net, it has been done but no word on how well it worked so  i will be experimenting with this idea for a simple shelter (think cement tent) or failing that a pond liner.
will report back when i try it.
this is all i can find but it gives no info
http://www.naturalbuildingblog.com/burlapcement-rain-fly-roof/