Wall of Trash

What in the world is this you may be asking yourself. This my friends is a Bucket Wall, the creation of a man from Capitan, USA. David Bradburn, a local contractor witnessed a neighbor having a fountain built of empty 5 Gal buckets, and realized that this would be a great building product. He researched the possibilities, and found someone else building a wall with buckets and sand using a method that David thought was far to labor intensive. Recognizing that nested buckets are very tough to seperate separate he hit on this as a posssibility and began experimenting with his options.

Dabid Invented a method of stacking buckets and compressing them with some of the bucket columns hollowed out and filled with with conrete to provide points that anchor the structure to the ground. This raw bucket wall is then wrapped with a metal mesh of some kind .

In this case, David has used Chain Link Fabric recovered from a neighbors re-fencing project, but I imagine remesh, garden fence, welded or woven stucco wire would also work. This mesh ties the structure together, and provides mechanical tooth for the plaster, and reinforces it to limit cracking. Rebar is also used as horizontal reinforcement and to minimize bowing (except where desired for aesthetics) This is tied to the buckets and the mesh as the stacks are erected.

After the mesh and rebar is installed The wall is plastered using a cement or lime based plaster like a stucco base coat, or a job site mixed product. David has also experimented with Cob as a filler material, although without the straw fiber, and says that it is a very good filler, but would not try it as a finish plaster. Here is a photo of a partially plastered wall section.

After the plaster fills up to the wire mesh, the wall is finished in a manner very similar to a traditional three coat stucco system with a scratch coat, followed by a brown coat. As for the finish coat, David is waiting to finish this project before he begins his finish coat. he could use either a traditional cementious finish, or a synthetic elastomeric finish. At the is point the wall will appear very similar to a traditional Adobe wall or even concrete block.

Needless to say, this is an extremely green method of building. Not only is David not increasing his carbon footprint and resource utilization by not using newly manufactured and transported materials, he is also reducing landfill by removing a product from the waste stream. Anyone with a Background in construction can attest to the sheer volume of buckets used and thrown away on a typical project, paint, roofing tar, drywall mud, adhesives and stucco finishes just to name a few are used in immense quantities.

If these buckets could be removed from garbage everywhere and put to use, the reduction in landfill would be  huge. This first fence will remove 12,000 cubic feet of waste from local landfills.

 

Anyone interested in contributing buckets, labor or anything else, or just looking for more information, please visit David at Recycledbucketwall.com

And the finished product.

Justin Ellis

justinellis3761@gmail.com

trowelandhammer.blogspot.com

Building a Clientèle

A hail storm rolls through town, and every roofer is busy. Busy bidding work, hoping to win some of the jobs, but not my customer. We'll call him Rick.

 Rick is busy to, making sure his crew is patching the roofs of the clients whose houses they refroofed the last time around. He isn't bidding, he has the jobs, and is already booked for a year, and gets a price that he can make money at. and oh by the way, he has had this same routine for the last ten years every time a hail storm hits. He works a normal week, and can easily take time off when he wants. He is successful by any measure including his own, and the gold standard for contractors in his market, with former employees starting there own companies, and a number of proteges in other trades. He can write his own ticket and is the definition of a pillar of the building community.
        
       To many building professionals that work directly with homeowners see their customers as a one and done relationship, Bid a job, win a job, complete the job, look for the next. This may be a great short term solution, but if you want to build a company rather than a job, building a clientèle is essential. A doctor, or lawyer would never dream of going from case to case, or disease to disease. My most successful contractor customers have spent lifetimes building a group or int he best cases a true community of clients, who don't shop their prices, don't ask for estimates, and simply call and have work done. This does not mean they simply bend over, it means they have a level of trust not found with other clients. This allows you to worry about profitability and quality, not just getting work.

      I am going to write more about this subject in the coming weeks, and hopefully will be interviewing a couple of contractors that have managed to do this for their business. If anyone has any experiences they want to share, please let me know.