Tuesday, July 12, 2011

Significant progress

Hey all – Bottle School progress has been going really fast, and I’m a little remiss for not sharing any photos, but it’s been so dang busy around here! Let me give you a quick visual summary of the past month:




Pretty crazy, right? This is what happens when you don’t post for a while! We’ve made awesome progress and we’re starting to look at late August for the inauguration. Currently we’re working on placing the bottles - here’s how it works.

First, cut yourself a length of chicken wire (cedazo) to match the opening between the columns and beams, weaving ¼” rebar through the edges like so:

That’s Chris Barry, head mason Frainer and community coordinator Don Miguel – see how they’ve interlaced the rebar through the holes of the chicken wire? Next, they’ll pull the chicken wire tight against the beams and columns, using the “pins” already poured into the concrete as braces:

Next, all you have to do is bend the pins back with a hammer, while someone pulls the chicken wire nice and tight. Now you have the surface onto which you’ll attach your bottles!

Attaching bottles isn’t rocket science – all you have to do is use plastic string. Watch this clip for an idea of how it works.



It’s pretty easy once you get the hang of it….

Here’s our first filled square!

Now the school is really starting to take shape – pretty much the entire first floor has been filled in with bottles:

The kids are cute:

The nice thing about how light the bottles are is that it makes our bottle schools safer for earthquakes – a definite concern in this country.

Here I am with my state-of-the-art sun protection system :)

Things are going great! We have about 3 or 4 weeks of work left, and then classes can begin. I’m both excited and thankful for how smooth the whole project has gone thus far!

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