This inside view of this small adobe casita built in the late 1970’s highlight the adobe walls to be repaired. The construction of this small space happened slowly, over quite a few years, and as a result the interior and well as exterior walls were worn down by the elements. We believe that the roof had not been properly placed upon the structure during the initial construction, therefore the rain and elements having access to the inside of the building, which is not a normal occurrence.
This is a prime example of why any naturally built wall system should be protected by, at least, earthen plastering as soon as physically possible, to secure and protect them. The adobe bricks in this wall had worn to a degree that it took a bit of work to level them up, remove the inferior cracked repairs which had occurred before our time, and to simply fill in the deep crevices that had been created in general. Some of the repairs at the bottom of the room took 2 to 3 passes of a cob mixture to fill them in properly.
Once the walls has been leveled and dried, we were then able to plaster with the local clay dirt which thankfully was still on-site with our standard go-to earthen plaster which worked well with the clay rich soil found in most areas of New Mexico.