Household archaeology

We had a little water damage in the back bathroom and so it was time to repair the wall and retile the room. When the tile guys tore off the old tile, they discovered two things. First, the water damage was much worse than anyone thought. Second, underneath the plaster wall are adobe bricks! We suspected that our house was old enough to be adobe, but I always thought this back portion of the house was probably cement block. It turns out that these little pigs live in a house made out of mud! How cool is that?

It's too bad that some of it got damaged, but isn't it amazing that you can make a house out of dirt and water. The repair guys said that's why our house keeps cool in the summer. Ha! I'm inviting him over in July.

The coolest part about having some of the bricks exposed is seeing how they're made.

We look at adobe all the time in our line of work. We've become experts in the texture, feel, even the sound of adobe under our trowels. I sometimes think it even smells a little different than regular dirt or house fill. Maybe that's leftover ashy smell from when sites burn, or maybe it's the smell of hundreds of years of water damage. I couldn't wait to touch and smell our wall. Alas, it is boring. It feels like hard mud and it smells like...nothing. 

There are lots of small pieces of grass and twigs stuck in the bricks. I still don't know how old the house is, but I like thinking about how those plants were growing in the ground and then they got mixed up by the builders. Now, they make up part of our house. 

It'll be nice to finally have the bathtub fixed and all, but how fun to get to know our home a little better.

 aaaaaand... here's your Amy picture.

Call me, yo!