SITE UPDATE

Last week, it was Jess who stepped up to the plate and into the mud. This past week, my friend Lena spent her Spring Break with me. I almost feel as though I must have scammed her. I suppose she got the traditional idea of Spring Break half right. Head far south of Syracuse and into the sun. But manual labor all week?


It turns out that Russians are a sturdy and rugged people. I threw her on all kinds of loops getting from the airport to the farm. I tested her will with (unintended) starvation. I even told her we could go hiking on Thursday, and then must have cleverly disguised shoveling gravel into a trench as hiking well enough that she didn't mind, or was too tired to remember our agreement.

In any case, she was an incredible, and much-appreciated volunteer. Just what I needed with the economy the way it is.

We finished digging the drainage trench, down to the nitty-and-very-gritty details. We tested the flow using a hose and real water.


The idea is that the slope of the trench should send any groundwater/rainwater/floodwater around the trench (under the future walls of the house), and out the drainage tail and away from the house. In this way, the drainage trench creates a theoretical "island" of subsoil upon which sits the living space. Think like water.

If there is ever so much water in the ground (such as during a 10,000-year flood) that it starts rising in the trench, it's good to have backup to get it out quick. So immersed in the gravel is a system of corrugated + perforated drain pipe. In Lena's "TRENCH-CAM" shot below, I am checking the slope of the gravel layer before laying in the drain pipe (enough slope is essential for efficient water-removal).



Here, we manufactured a T-connector from two scrap corner pieces, a hacksaw, and duct tape.


After the pipe was in, and pinned in place with rocks, it was just shovel, shovel, dump, and repeat.


At the conclusion of our week, we had filled the trench completely. We covered it with woven plastic grain bags, which will act as a water-permeable membrane (letting water into the trench, and keeping out as much soil/clay/silt as possible, all of which will find their way in eventually and clog the trench over time).


We started filling in the drainage tail with broken chunks of concrete, rocks, and other rubble.


Next week I, alone, will continue with the rubble infill, and will then move onto the stone foundation. This is representative of one of those points that separates boys from men.

You can't take the artist out of the designer.

Lena is the justifiably proud owner of a big, fat SLR camera, and a finger that is trigger-happy. Here are some of the shots she took when she dodged her duties and wandered off site.

Perhaps the most scar-filled life is that of a telephone pole in a college town.


Kaia is the 3.5-year-old daughter of Megan and Tim (owners of Pickards Mountain). She just recently took a pair of scissors into a dark corner and lopped off her curls.

Back at the wheel

It's poor form to build a cottage just for the hell of it. I've designed this little mud lair around the needs of a lady who grows good food and answers to Margaret. She'll creates opportunities for massage out of thin air. In this particular instance, she made an ambiguous claim about the link between sun and skin cancer, with sunscreen in hand. She followed it up with a pouty face and indicated through interpretive dance that her elbows don't bend in a way that allows her to rub her own shoulders. My elbows bend as far as an owl can turn it's head, but hey, I'm my own man.


In the end, Karma worked in my favor, as Margaret offered me a weekend's stay at her parents' house near Richmond, Virginia. Her mother happens to be a potter. She's a twig of a lady, but with enough energy to fill the void between any polar bear and the closest wild banana tree. She got me seated at a wheel, threw me some clay, and let me loose. I made 8 pieces on Saturday (shown below). On Sunday they had dried enough so that I could "tool the foot" of each. I am in eager anticipation of my next chance to visit, so I can glaze and fire.



Mrs. Krome has been a production potter for 34 years! This blue glaze is what people want, sales have indicated.



A snapshot of the family. Mr. Lukens is also a hell of a guy. He imparted upon me all kinds of stories from his youth, from his 3 years living on a sailboat to his time out West, and bits and pieces of what living is all about (namely, having a prize-winning beard).

Why stop here?

I've gotten more than two or three comments in the past week about the level to which I take consumption of an apple. Below are the remains of my midnight snack.


What puzzles me, is that this particular specimen would surely glean comments - "Greg! Geez! Just eat two!" - but I see an almost embarrassingly large amount of fruit still there, staring back at me with it's seedy eyes.

The SITE

I started to write an elaborate post about my travels in the past three weeks, and it drained me before the halfway mark. It's in the works. Here's a quick update on the building site. The mantra continues to be "slow and steady wins the race."


(mid-January...) The site was finally level, so it became time to stake out the shape of the building.


I'm always rubbing clay on my pants, but it doesn't always end up looking better than half the art in the MOMA.


Two considerations that are always on my mind when deciding on my next move are: "am I being trendy?" and "How can I stay in the confines of my 1G budget?" Below, I have the Gator parked on top of an old, abandoned building site. Around the gator is a trench filled with gravel, and drain pipe, much like the drainage trench my building needs. So I spent Inauguration day, and the day after, digging out the gravel and pipe from this trench, and carting it up to my site in the gator. Re-use is both trendy and fiscally sound (in this case to the pretty tune of at least $200 in savings).


Here I am digging the trench, into which the rescued gravel will soon go. This was how I left the trench before taking a fortnight vacation up to NY. "Oh, you should build a little cob castle in the middle, it looks just like a moat!" people tended to comment.


Upon my return from New York, nature had made a similar comment, substituting water for words. Initially, the standing water was about 2 inches from the top edge of the trench. By the time of the photo, my friend Jess and I had created enough of a drainage tail that we had dropped the water level substantially. There was a sense of urgency, because the longer the water sat, the more the trench would erode (we were reminded of the urgency by consistent "plops," the distinct sound of earth eroding and plummeting in the moat).


Here is Jess at the end of the drainage tail, pulling orange mud along the bottom of the trench to allow the water to flow to freedom. This muckraker of a girl was a HUGE help, in lending both her time, companionship, and every ounce of strength she could muster (as well as providing me with the 12-hour car ride back down from NY). Try as I might, I wasn't deft enough to get a photo of her face.


It was a job for bare feet, because I didn't want to ruin my boots. The problem was that the water temperature was close to freezing (it had a cover of ice upon our arrival), so a couple times I had to hobble to the kitchen and heat up water on the stove to bring feeling back to my toes.



After all the water was drained, we spent the rest of the week doing other things (moving earth to appropriate places, making some cob!, and collecting stone for the foundation). The trench was left to dry out, so that tomorrow I can clear out the lose, eroded material. Then it should be ready to fill with gravel (and drainage pipe).

This marks a big step in the building process, the point at which I stop working DOWN into the earth, and start building UP from the earth. My friend, Yelena, from the SU Industrial Design program, should be arriving tomorrow to graciously (and naively?) spend her spring break on my site, helping me.

It feels so good to admit that I can't do it alone.