Slow and Steady...

Here's some of the stuff I've been working on from my current house project. I can't wait to give it a name, but that will have to come much later once I really form a relationship with it, and after I embed the tongues of my old Pumas in one of the walls (the shoes that biked me to Oregon, and cobbed with me all summer until the very end).

First, the floor plan. Notice the rocket stove near the entrance. The rocket mass heater stove is a type of stove designed by Ianto. It can be made in a weekend for under $100. There are a lot of ideas behind the concept, but one of the coziest ideas is that the pipe exiting the stove is run through big massive elements of built-in furniture (in this case the window seat, and a step below the desk), and heats up these masses. So when you're stove is running, you can sit on a heated seat, or rest your feet on a warm step as you write at your desk. These masses heat up, and then store the heat and let it off slowly over time, so your window seat will be toasty for up to 2 or 3 days after the fire is out. Some people have run the pipe through a built-in bed, and enjoyed the comforts of heated sleep.



And the elevation view(s), the original and revised together (my plans were revised after a good long phone call to Ianto and my physical experience at the site):


Here is a cardboard sketch model to show the complex shape of the roof and determine how well and where it will shed rain runoff.
This has been my staple food, raw collard green salad with nuts, sprouts, seeds, and soy sauce:


It snowed last week! It was so cold at night that the tent just wouldn't have done the trick, so gardener Margaret allowed me a warm floor in her yome (below) upon which to rest my weary body:


My little tool shed is standing up to the elements quite respectably:


The earth here is a healthy mix of clay and rock. The color is beautiful. I had to stop digging and put my grubby hands on the camera for a shot of this chipped rock... look at the primary colors in it (top middle). I wish every day that I had paid more attention in 9th grade Earth Science:


Here is what the site looks like. I almost hate to put up a photo of it, because it really makes it look like I've spent a month doing a whole heck of a lot of nothing. But it's ready now. Earth-moving and planning take a long time. The main grass that you see is called Broom Sedge. It seems like a perfect candidate to plant on the living roof, because it can survive without much topsoil. So when the roof is covered in it, not only will it really blend into its surroundings, but it will look like the house has hair, a desirable characteristic.


And to finish it off, a poster for the green roof workshop I'll be teaching in May, which will be the finishing touch on the house! (I'm also co-teaching a cob workshop the first week of May with my fellow cob cottage apprentice, Mike, in which we will hopefully get the walls up):

BEDROCK

I was going to give up on blogging. But then I'll just start giving up on everything. So to prevent this imminent danger, here are some photos of the house I helped build over the summer. And a link to more of them. FINALLY! I've been waiting for these. There are about 2,000 photos packed away on a camera in England, in the hands of a potter named Jo (she was our designated photographer). And I'm hoping to get a CD of them in the mail from her soon, so that I can actually show some of the in-progress shots.

Notice the clever name: Bedrock. Two reasons: there's a huge boulder built into it (and the boulder is just the tip of the iceberg; a protrusion of a large expanse of bedrock). And also: we built the bed on top of this rock. It's my favorite part of the house - so unique. It almost like a natural geo-thermal system. The rock should moderate the whole temperature of the cottage.

I talked to Ianto and Linda (owners of Cob Cottage) a week ago, and they say that the main windows are in, the roof is green and full of flowers, the fire has been going, and people have been staying there and commenting on its charm. It will forever be one of my favorite spaces.

The exclamation window is on the East side and at the foot of the bed, so that you wake up in the morning with the sun shining through and yelling "WAKE UP!" And notice the foundation stones - it's broken up pieces of concrete from the floor of a cheese factory that we hauled in a truck, and then in wheelbarrows up a hill. And the window in the door is one of Linda's blue plates that we stole while she was gone one day. Reuse at its best.

Very excited about life

I had a little talk with my sister, Elaine, last night about finances and living plans for my next step after this North Carolina gig. I was just looking at some housing concepts by an Australian architecture group online, and got started thinking about a tiny little living space that would fit on a pickup truck bed, and could be attached to two canoes, catamaran-style. So you could drive it in your truck to the water's edge, and then paddle it out to an island and live there for a little. And after it was set up on the island, you could use the two canoes as transport (back to the truck, and to a nearby town for food) and recreation vehicles. Or you could just float it as a houseboat when you felt like it. It would of course be super-light, probably a stick-frame wrapped in stretched canvas (so you could paint on it, and it would be like living in three-dimensional fine art). I could build it almost for free I bet, just from scraps and miscellaneous hardware. The canvas would be the expense. It would be a multi-function sleep-space, cook/eat-space, read/write-space, shower space (a solar shower with a showerhead on the exterior of the building gravity-fed from a solar-heated tank on the roof that you would fill up once you reach the island). I guess a 6x8 footprint. Maybe an aluminum roof for romantic rain sounds.

In any case, I'm going to sketch it up in the evenings this next week, while I'm living at Pickards Mountain (hopefully getting a lot of trench-digging done on the house site). There's more to the idea that makes it a bit more practical; the canoe-catamaran/island idea is just one blue-sky facet of a bigger diamond.

The equally exciting part is that the way I'm figuring it, living as a single person with no pets, children, or wives, shouldn't require even close to a full-time job. If I can live off of $1,000/month (including health insurance, car insurance, gas, food, miscellaneous, cell phone bill, etc...) then I only need $250 a week. And if I can pull in $300/week, then I can put the extra $2,400/yr into savings. Of course I need to gather enough funds in the next year to buy a truck, and start a garden (and get some land). I gotta win a lot of contests.

"What about if I want to have a family!?"
Well that would change everything, wouldn't it. So I will look forward to that change someday, but I don't see a point in planning my current life around it (just need to keep saving,but my grandma went through the depression so she has taught me well).

Natural Building

If you're into astounding data, unbelievable photos, and unparalleled natural building, check out this unarguably interesting list of animal architecture.




At first, I was thinking to include the phrase "real natural building" somewhere in here, as a knock to what mankind builds today. But that would really discount a lot of what humans have built in the past, and build today in other cultures (not to mention what I intend to build). Mud is still the #1 building material in the world. Take a sneak peak at this hogan:



But I find animal structures to be just mind-blowing works of form, size, and community effort.

Rainy

The rain gods do not want to see another building go up on the canvas below them. It was pouring all day long, and is predicted to again tomorrow. So I used today as a car day (the benefits of which are greatly increased cargo capacity and dryness over a bike). I need to get all my essential tools to the site, so that I can both start using them, and figuring out what I need and don't have.

I went back to the old house (which is not yet on the market) to scavenge through Doug's collection of tools/materials in the garage. It was a bit overwhelming for me. I expected to be in and out quick, with a wheelbarrow, a couple levels, and 3 tarps. I instead felt like I was on a shopping spree in a hardware store (of course it was a bit different, because all of these things still belong to Doug and Elaine). Everything I looked at appeared as if it might be useful, and when I would then pick an item up, there would be 3 more underneath that had just as much draw.

I packed the car, drove to the farm, and on the way thought about how I had nowhere to then store these tools. I remembered a big pile of scrap lumber, intended for burning, out of which I thought I may be able to concoct a tool shed. A quick phone call to Margaret left me with a "yes, go for it." And so a portion of this:



is now this:



which isn't much, but it gave me something to do in the rain, and it will keep all of my tools dry (once I get a tarp over it, and some pallets on the ground). So nothing got done on the actual house site, but I'm realizing how much prep work I'm going to need to do to get this project off the ground. No worries, though, just awareness.

it has begun

On New Years day, I had a meeting/presentation with the deciders at Pickards Mountain. It went really well; they seemed genuinely excited about the look and feel of my cottage concept, and we walked the land and decided on a site (which was, thankfully, the site I had my heart set on). We also came to a conclusion about who the space should be designed for. Rather than having it serve as a home for transient visitors - as was the original intention - it will instead be the more permanent residence of the "garden caretaker." Right now, that is Margaret, and she intends to stay for a good while. I'm looking forward to this, because I'll be designing the space around a person that I know well and will be interacting with on a daily basis. We can throw ideas back and forth, and she can be my feedback oracle. It's always more satisfying to design something that is specific, as opposed to general.

I biked to the mountain this weekend, in order to start working the site.

This is what the site looks like from a bit of distance down the hill.



Starting to clear the site.



What it looks like when I left on Sunday. The evergreens around the cleared site are a dream come true: three on the West side (far right in the photo) to block hot evening sun; one on the north side to block wind; and one on the East side to keep the bed space (intended to be on this side of the house) cool during the hot summers. Of course, right now they won't do much because they're young and puny. But this works to my advantage, because if they were much bigger now, they'd just be in my way.


The next step is to figure out the dimensions of the building more clearly, and then stake out the shape of the walls, and do some earth-moving to level the appropriate surfaces.