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.