cob if you want

There are some angles on the land from which the cottage looks particularly spectacular in its shape, and make me wish that I had a camera. If I was up on my sketching, I would have captured these vistas on paper, and then scanned them in. But alas, people find the camera to be more truthful than the hand anyhow.

Here are some photos I have procured from friends and fellow builders that provide a similar story to mine through different brain-eyes.

Here is the Green Roof from the garden, holding the weight of a sleeper (Mike on his last night):


This is perhaps my favorite angle to enjoy the roof line from:


An in-your-face capture of some green roof residents:

My sister encouraged me to post this photo to explain more clearly how the rafters are "cobbed" into the wall:


Here is the first floor layer, which is a drainage layer - made up of about 4 yards (!) of hand-harvested stone and gravel from around the land, hauled back to the site in wheelbarrows and buckets. It's a very glorious emotion that I feel when I consider how hard we worked to move all of that geologic material, and how much money we saved and ecological damage we avoided responsibility for by not purchasing gravel.


The second layer of floor is a 2.5" subfloor layer, made of grit, sand, straw, and clay slip. The straw will act similarly to the rebar in poured concrete.


I wish I had a photo of the finished subfloor. It looks gorgeous and smooth and is amazingly level (we'll see how it settles over the summer).


Glory shot:


I noticed on one of the last days in North Carolina that An had written on her shirt in German. She told me she woke up in her tent with a pen nearby and felt like some shirt-writing.


"Cob if you want"

And she did.


Now I'm back in Syracuse through Monday, at which point I will be heading to Stony Creek Farm in Walton, NY. I will occupy my time there with more building, both in the structural sense as well as community... until August, when I return to North Carolina and finish what I started.

my camera's last words were

Today was my final Uncle Monday for this round of North Carolina. Yesterday was my last teaching day, as we finished up our Green Roof Workshop (strong and biologically). This week will be a mad dash to get an adobe floor poured, and then on Friday I skip town with my sister, nephew, and An - zipping north.

I put my camera through a lot over the past year: living in tents, held with the muddiest of fingers, accelerating at 9.8 m/sec^2 onto hard ground. It has shed much of its skin of chrome buttons and aluminum casing. How fitting that it should breathe its final gasp of air right before the roof is finished. Photos just allow us to physically separate ourselves from the things we know we should see. In a photograph of the cottage you can't hear its beckoning whispers: "hop through my arch" or "nap on my roof." A walk is worth 1,000 pictures.

In any case, below are some captured moments of time.

This is a good demonstration of the free-form nature of cob. That's a rectangular window, with a cob makeover.


Do you see the koala face?


This is a nice photo by Mike, taken right after we placed our six long full-spanning rafters.


Here is An fooling around with the placement of the radial rafters.


And the shadows they make.


It's a constant process of tweaking rafters, jumping down and stepping back for a true view, checking whether the roof line is voluptuous enough, and repetitive tweaks until it's right.


Radials again. It's easy to get sick of rectangles and lines and boxes, but not so much with curves. (said the hopeful natural builder to the beautiful lady beside him)


Putting on the "bender-board" decking. Each trapezoid is custom-cut.


If Mike and I ever start a building group, we have a photo to put on the tri-fold brochure.


Thank you to my friend Jaimie (the blonde head sticking above the roof line)! She came down to help for four days, and contributed some great sculptural work on the interior of the building, as well as roof work.


The dumpster behind the carpet store in town provided us with rugs and carpet underlay galore (some of it brand new, wrapped in plastic). This was used for the 2 cushioning layers of the green roof that sandwich our salvaged pool liner. Aside from the wood members, and metal fasteners, our green roof was completely free.


Here is Ian from Iowa (An's husband) screwing on some of the fascia boards, which function to hold the layer of soil/plants, as well as accenting the shape of the roof and making it sing.


And here are two color-challenged photos taken with my other camera, which apparently has a bad lens. There are in-progress shots of the green roof workshop.



I'll be putting up finished roof photos next week.

I can't believe how many hands this tiny cottage represents. Everyone has put so much of themselves into it, and the feedback Mike and I have received is some of the most meaningful stringings of words that I have ever known to exist. This project has brought thousands of wheelbarrows full of love into this world.