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.