Peru Home Pt. 3 – The Material
June 12th, 2007
On some basic level, everyone is an environmentalist; you’ll be hard pressed to find someone who honestly doesn’t want clean water, or clean air, or the occasional frolicking animal. I don´t really consider myself an environmentalist, not so much because I don´t believe in saving the planet but more from upbringing; where I grew up, ´environmentalist¨ replaced ´Communist´ as the pejorative of choice around 1992. So it came as a bit of a surprise that I ended up building my own green building out of recycled and recyclable products. I didn´t even use power tools.
Lima´s weather is some of the strangest in the world, not in its variety but in its unnerving consistency. Despite being on the ocean, it never rains, it never gets hotter than about 85 and never colder than the low 50s. It is an easy town to dress in, and even easier to design a home for.Because of the mildness, my house used plastic panels as walls – no need for insulation. If nothing else, I could rest assured that no spring showers would expose my poor engineering.
The panels took forever and a half to make by myself, each by hand. I used vegetable bags, the kind you get at the supermarket for your tomatoes, layered three deep in two by two sections. I used a piece of butcher paper to cover the sheet and then ran a regular clothes iron in circular sweeps over the paper. Though the iron is relatively cool, the plastic melts readily to itself. The resulting material is waterproof, and surprisingly tough,almost tarp-like. The more layers, incidentally, the tougher the material. Though this blog has discussed items being made in this way (such as wallets) I don´t think it´s common to make such large sheets of plastic and to use them as a building material.
In the end, I made around seventy 24 in x 18 in panels, using about 1200 bags in the process. I lost many afternoons behind my iron, but in the end I had my walls.
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