nephew update

The cottage isn't my everything down here in North Carolina. Here's a photo update of my time spent with nephew Ian.

What a well-behaved, angelic little eater. That is my sister's hand on the spoon, not to be confused with the hand of a cobber.

I'm trying to get Ian interested in building and structure from a young age, so our toy of choice is his colored wooden block set. Try as I might, he seems to be more into deconstruction than anything else.




Consider how much larger my brain might be than that of the little boy.

A top-of-the-stairs shot by Elaine. All subjects are satisfied: me with my watermelon, Lilo with my watermelon droppings, and Ian with access to my most tender chest hairs.

the three yeast and the rising

The workshop is over, but the building process is not. Luckily, Mike and I have a third member on our team as we continue to sculpt :


This is An. She is originally from Austria, and has been living in Iowa with her husband (an Iowan) for the past year and a half. Just last week, she got the good news that their land dreams will be coming true. Congratulations! She'll take the mud knowledge to the Midwest, and create some beautiful cob houses, I have no doubt. An is a phenomenal fire-builder, knows her edible plants, and has a very solid and creative design mind. I feel completely comfortable leaving her with a project, and letting her make decisions and execute. It's really important to have a team of folks whom you trust. She just started a wild yeast culture over the past week, and sent some back with me to my sister's place, so that I can make for Ian his first ever sourdough pancakes!

We got a lot done this week, including a lot of detailed interior work: the bamboo shelves, slate bench, and sculpted window ledges. The arch is strong enough to walk over, 3 out of 4 windows are in, all the strawbales are up, and we have the desk spot ready-to-go (still searching for the actual desk-top itself). It feels like a cottage!


(mother, notice the bottle of sunscreen on the bamboo shelf)

When looking at the wall and thinking "Hmmm... looks pretty rough and bumpy and uncivilized," be aware that in August the earthen plaster will cover over the cob and change everything. There's nothing more beautiful than a sculpted and plastered hobbit hole.

Success

The workshop ended with a bang/gust/downpour on Saturday evening, as we all stood soaked in the kitchen, looking out onto the weathery mess of a sky and laughing as a line of maggots migrated among our feet like lemmings. All day it was sunny and the clouds were puffy and innocent. But as we slowly lumbered back to the site post egg-salad snacking, drops starting falling, and before long there was a circus of flexing winds and rain blankets that had come without warning. We were scattered but quick in our efforts to cover the half-finished hobbit hole that had arrived on this earth seemingly just as fast as that storm.

The week was an incredible success, and a very inspiring combination of quick community, determined efforts, and quality results. It makes me want to do it again.

We started off on saturday with a quick cob-mixing demonstration:



As expected with such a democratic material, folks picked it up quickly and we had a good amount of material on the wall by the end of a day:


It's not often that you see a sleeping baby swaddled across the chest of a construction worker:


The cob really shows off that stone foundation:


Starting to form the built-in cob bench and desk supports:


We had a very loose schedule, letting the workshop evolve around questions and bodies and weather. To take a break mid-week when people were starting to feel drained, we took a field trip to Danielle's nearby start-up farm (where she plans to build a cob house someday soon) and ran a siting exercise, to help pick the perfect spot for her future dwelling. We got out her shovels and dug holes everywhere, and were pleased to find many different colors of pure clay all in different veins within her tiny plot of land:


This long and clever piece of glass is at the foot of the bed area, so that Margaret's bed view will encompass the ground all the way up to the stars:


Sean bugged us all week to rent a gasoline-powered mortar mixing to assist in speedy and foot-saving cob mixing. Both Mike and I were skeptical, but wanted to give people the experience, and it ended up working really well and raising morale from people's toes on up. Below, Mike is taming the devil, as it spits out cob from it's dark and gated belly.


Strawbale/cob hybrid walls:




Check out the thickness of those walls! The "spine-and-ribs" technique (the blocky/bumpy style of building you see on the close wall below) allows the wall to dry faster and lock in to the next layer of cob. The holes in the wall also speed up drying, help weave straw together between adjoining cobs, and will provide some "tooth" for the plaster when it goes on in August.


The arch gets built little by little, and is a very delicate process, over which people often fall in love:




We were really happy about how the whole thing ended. We were planning to have a candle-lit dinner inside of the half-house with cheese and wine and chocolate and ice cream and beer. For ceremony's sake, we were going to steal a mason jar from the kitchen and create a time capsule to "cob into the wall." But because this is so corny and overdone at cob workshops, Mother Nature obliged to take over and send us our storm, ripping down all sorts of things around the farm, but leaving our little house looking as if nothing had happened. It passed the test.

More photos to come next weekend.

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!