iCandy

You might remember this January original:


Below are the latest editions, sketched onto photos of the real existing foundation. I love bringing these daydreams to life on digital paper, although it never seems quite worth the time because the house will evolve into what it wants to be. I hope it wants a Canary yellow door.


The great and unnaturally-green American "lawn" perched atop this one is brought to you by Scott's Turf Builder:


So I suppose this workshop is the culmination of my last 5 months of effort. I hope that the sky gods behave when cooking up next week's weather, and that some unemployed & brilliant muse steps out of retirement and into my soul starting saturday. Thanks to all that have helped, and all those who will be here soon - a special thank you to Elaine and Doug (my sister and brother-in-law) for providing me with a home (and food, and tools, and a projector, and a scanner, and...) for various lengths of time during my stay here, and having the child that brought me here in the first place. Thank you mud, for freedom.

people next to the wall

For all of you out there dying for a reference of scale, I stole a photo from my nephew's blog, from his Sunday visit to my stone wall. I am holding Ian, and my sister Elaine is enjoying the Northwest corner of the building, where Margaret's bed will go.

it could be a castle

Next Sunday evening there will be no new blog post, because Mike and I will be two days into the week-long workshop that we are teaching! At this point, every feeling filling me up is the purest extract of excitement - no nervousness or stress thus far, a good sign.

This past weekend there was a "FARM TOUR" going on in this area of North Carolina. It's like a big farm open house, and people drive from farm to farm, picking and choosing the ones that they wish to see. On Saturday we had 400+ people come by! Sunday was more of the same. So it was a good opportunity for Mike and I to answer a lot of questions, and talk about Cob, and explain our design strategies... a good guinea-piggish run-through of what we'll be experiencing for 8 days straight next week.

Today was big, because we finished up the stone work! And I have the photos to prove it.




That's pretty much what it looks like now. The North (back) wall is about 5 1/2 feet high at some points, and sturdy as a mountain goat's tendon matrix. The stones on that back wall are BIG. Some I'd imagine would tip the scales at around 250 or 300 pounds. After a combination of pickup-trucking some to the site, and rolling others up from the woods, it was time to try "the method" (with stones that I just couldn't lift off the ground, not even a nano-inch).


The method worked. I got 3 enormous rocks across the trench and onto the wall using a stick-bridge, and without any falling down onto my toes. However, at one point I was using little "chinker" rocks to stabilize a big guy, and the big guy had a friend balanced on top of him, and the friend (an isosceles triangle with a sharp point) took a jump into the side of my head. A quick trip to the ice-box, and some quick mental arithmetic success left me feeling fine.

I love the complex pattern of shapes, shadows, and planes that the marriage of rock wall + sunlight provides for us:


Here is "Yoga Mike" testing the holding power of a bridge-stone:


Here is some additional detail work on the interior exposed hearth wall. The cob will just drip around all these little chunky stones, like melting chocolate on a pearl necklace:


Most of my Sunday was spent filling in the gap between the two faces of stone that we layed on-edge. The main filler was our trusty sand-clay mortar. To save on mortar, create some insulation value, and salvage materials, I raided the recycling bin and integrated some bottles and styrofoam into the filler:



The (glass) bottles themselves aren't any good for insulation, but the pockets of air that they create will be.

On to a week of tying up loose-ends before the workshop participants arrive and demand their money's worth of learning. I'm looking forward to a visit from my good friend Jeremy Curtiss, a fellow Industrial Design graduate. He'll be coming up Thursday or Friday and staying on through the workshop to be an assistant teacher, and help document the project. He'll also be trying to find himself, I'd imagine, and what better place than this?

, and what a wall it is

You can scroll down to the previous entry to examine the level of the wall at the end of last week. On your scroll, your eyes might not be able to ignore

HOW

BIG

IT IS

NOWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW!!!!!!!!!!!!!


There's Mike (above), testing the threshold. He has this habit of jumping onto the wall whenever he gets a chance, and hopping from stone to stone, with his bare little feet. I'm the type of person who's too timid to walk on my own work, for fear that it might tumble apart and damage my pride (and require more extra hours and backbones to re-assemble it than I have available). When he prances across a new section of mine, I have learned to hold my tongue, and appreciate his doing what I am not man enough to do.

Below, please feast your eyes on the most precious stonework in the house, the interior hearth wall. These grandfather stones didn't just jump onto the wall and dance into a unified puzzle. They spent thousands of years forming unique personalities, all very independent and rugged beasts. It took some perspiration and a 2.5 pound sledgehammer to coax them into the idea of a tight-knit community.


The ugly gray "stones" (concrete) on the left side of the photo will be covered up with cob, and a poured adobe floor will eventually cover up the bottom 11 inches of wall. The beautiful big ones that makes up the right 2/3 of the photo are the ones that will be left exposed, with cob running along the top profile of them. Not only will they look nice, but they will soak up the heat from the stove, and allow it to slowly dissipate throughout those long winter nights.

We like to treat ourselves one day a week with some local brews, which aided me in my ability to visualize negative spaces and pair them up with the fitting physical stones. I used the timer feature on my camera, because Mike was off in the woods, tent-snoozing for hours and hours (couldn't handle the solar power on his body).



Fitting together stones has proven to be one of the most satisfying things I've ever done. Saturday was a day in which my current pursuits in life were affirmed to the fullest extent (whereas sometimes I've thought: "why the hell have I been digging for months in the winter without paycheck or companion?"). I felt alive deep down in my body, and my mind was breathing through my skull. There was quite simply nowhere in the world I would rather have been than on that site. I don't want to work for anyone I don't love, and I don't want to work on anything that doesn't get me out of sleeping bag happy and inspired.

You can see, we've just about reached ground level on the high North side (2 1/2 feet). That wall still needs 18 inches more of height, to keep the cob safely off the ground.


Now that we're at the point of that wall that will be visible above ground, we're using our most beautiful stones (that we've been stingy about saving along the way) in an upright band, to really show off their gorgeous faces. Because they're stacked on edge, it's important to secure them with "bridge" stones (shown in the photo below). The weight of the cob walls will push downwards, and these bridges will hold everything together as a solid unit.


Here I am testing out a bridge stone, giving it all the body I've got.


Mike and I worked about 42 hours in 5 days, which is quite a bit of stonework. On Saturday, we took a much-deserved break for a trip into town to the farmer's market, and food co-op. The town of Carrboro is a free wireless internet town, so Mike and I were able to sit out on the lawn in front of the food co-op and use our computers to check e-mail. It seems to be the most popular place to be, and is always crowded with townsfolk eating ice cream, sampling wine, having picnics, and asking me to watch their dogs while they shop.


Next week, we should finish up the wall, and then have one more week to tie up any loose ends before the workshop on May 2nd!

Just more of the same

This was a short week for Mike and I: Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. We ended up fitting 27 hours of stone-work into those three days (we need at least 25hrs/wk to earn our food stipend, and doing just the bare minimum would embarrass fellows like us). On Friday, Mike headed up to NY for a long Easter weekend with his folks, and he dropped me off along the way in Virginia to spend a weekend with Margaret's family and friends.

Needless to say, by the end of Thursday's session we relied on beer and the Rolling Stones to help us build the vertical rock puzzle at a worthy pace. My back wanted this four-day weekend just as much as nephew Ian wishes my nipples would squirt milk when he pincer-grips them with wide eyes.

Below you'll notice how strangely some of the rocks are shaped.


It takes time to build these challenged shapes up into level courses, but will you just look at that bubble?


The wall is definitely looking good. Well, part of it looks bad. Ugly. But that is the part that will live below final-grade, and never be seen. It all feels really good. I'm very proud of this creation. Mike and I do a good job walking atop it often, stomping like madmen, chanting and panting, to make sure the rocks are going to be there for 500 years. It wouldn't surprise me if he urinates on it when I'm away, as a kind of acid test.


We have about two more weeks before the workshop, and much to accomplish: finish the foundation, gather materials, organize the schedule, clear campsites for people, prepare lectures, etc... It's going to be an exciting fortnight.

Below is the Rumford fireplace in action. I spent a good 3 hours just sitting in front of it alone, mesmerized by the colors and sounds, and welcoming the heat into my torso. Near the end of the gig, I couldn't resist turning a lonely apple into a late-night treat by throwing it into the fire wrapped in foil, and then dressing it with butter, cinnamon, and brown sugar.


In Virginia this weekend, I took the opportunity to jump in Margaret's mother's pottery studio. The pots I had made last time had since been bisque-fired (the initial firing), and were ready for the next step. And so I glazed, and with a whole new theory. I hope they turn out well, but I'll have to wait until my next visit to find out. I can't extend enough thanks to Betsy for her gift of studio, supplies, time, mind, and clay!

dry, on the rocks.

Every stone must be

Collected. Organized. Lifted. Memorized. Stacked. Stood upon. Pressed upon. Scrutinized. Dropped. Picked up. Placed. No. Dropped. Picked up. Placed. No. Dropped. Lifted. Maneuvered. Ball-bustingly heaved. Placed. Not quite. Shaped. Chiseled. Smashed. Massaged. Spoken to. One more time. YES!

Such is the way of the (modified) dry-stack stone foundation. I say modified, because we are using a sand/clay mortar. We aren't slopping it on like cake decorators, though, we're just using it to fill in gaps in the wall through which drafts or mice could potentially enter the house. It's still a rock-on-rock situation.

My help is here. His name is Mike. He's a white skinny guy with glasses and curls, much like myself, but carrot-topped. He's the last real American man. We work well, slow, and quiet. Here he is channeling energy into a stone. He'll wiggle it, tickle it, then walk on it, until it calls him daddy.


The big, rippled rock is the "threshold" (on top of which the door will go). There's no getting in or out of the house without her permission. She's probably 400 pounds, and she's not afraid to look you in the eye and ask for the magic word. If you look close, you can see the sand/clay mortar between the rocks in the middle of the photo.


When Mike had first arrived, we began laying the stone foundation on the actual site. After day 1, a rainy and demoralizing day, we realized we didn't know squat about stone-stacking. So we took down what we had done and began playing around with rocks elsewhere, making test walls, and monuments, and getting a feel for what is solid and pretty.

We have two types of stones: Virginia stones, and local stones. The Virginia stones were shipped in years ago from a historic Virginian house site, and have been used extensively around the farm. There was a small pile left, and I got the go-ahead to use it on my cottage. They are beautiful stones: flat, nice edges, gorgeous colored faces, and bow ties. Our local stones are much different. They are jagged, pointy, randomly complexified, and might take your life from you if you fell on one at the wrong angle. We've been told they might be a type of flint, and probably what the Native Americans in this region used to fashion arrowheads. They're difficult to stack. Here is a test wall made by Mike, using Virginia stones.


Here I am, shaping one of the local stones. It keeps saying "no," and I just keep telling it "yes."

This was a monumental moment: the completion of the first course! It took days, because we used the biggest, heaviest, and most strangely-shaped rocks (the reasons being that this course will not be seen, heavy rocks are good to have on the bottom to spread the load of the walls, and we want our work to get easier and easier).


I was thrilled to again have Jess visit me. We had talked about her coming early last week, but never set a day or time. I was surprised by a Wednesday morning text message along the lines of "I'm in PA, driving south, ETA 7:00 PM." Jess did everything we did: rock-shaping, mortar testing, mortar laying, muscle-flexing, and stone-stacking.


Jess also got a little burnt, because she didn't want to rub clay all over herself.


On Saturday, Jess and I took our weary bodies into town and spent all her money, and none of mine. We bought a white sweet potato and a regular sweet potato at the farmer's market, did a lot of biking, checked out the "really really free market," stopped in a pottery store, and a bookstore, and a thrift store (new shirt), found a playground cove in which to do Yoga, ate our traditional Weaver Street Market meal of bread/hummus and an ice cream pint in the sunny grass, and watched squirrels in the highest and most delicate limbs of the UNC campus trees. Back at the farm, we chopped wood and built a Rumford fireplace, in which we had a blazing fire spitting flames around two tin-foil packages full of sweet potato, onion chunks, and chives (that we harvested earlier in the day from under Jess' butt in a yard).

The god brick sits atop the Rumford, encouraging the army of bricks beneath it to send directional heat out towards the camera, and smoke up towards the moon.


Thanks, Jess. And it's really great to have Mike. I'll be heading back to the site tomorrow, with the intention of putting up another couple courses of stone this week.