Upcoming Workshops!

Its Spring!!!

As each season comes to it’s end and the next is waiting new, something inside of me always feels refreshed.  Like letting out a deeply held breath.  But this time of year, right before the trees transform from bare branches, and the landscape everywhere is about to explode into an electric green… it’s my favorite time of year, and I always get a little excited.  There is so much energy and anticipation in the earth, waiting for just the right moment to burst out.  Shouldn’t April be the first month of the year?

The addition has been waiting all winter as well.  We got things to a good stopping point, and then left it for the season.  Greg has kept busy working on other projects, and now that it is getting warmer (tomorrow is supposed to be in the 70′s!) we’ll be planning a time soon to finish the addition.  We’ve also been planning…another house!  The building never ends…

Also exciting…Greg and Mike are teaching a series of workshops nearby this May.  They are going to be hosted at Pickard’s Mountain Eco-Institute near Chapel Hill this April and May.  They’ll be teaching one 7 day intensive workshop, as well as a few weekend workshops.  Plenty of mud and straw is in the near future!  Here are the links:

7 Day Cob Intensive

Earthen Oven 3 Day Workshop

Natural Plaster Weekend

If you’ve been looking for good cob workshop in the southeast, check out one the links above, and then come visit NC!

I also can’t resist sharing a little cuteness.  My sweet guy loves to “mix plaster” in his wheelbarrow, and make a big, muddy mess.  Here are a couple pictures of Leo learning to mix up earthen plaster and then trowel it on the wall.  18 months is a bit young, but I thought he did great job! (Although he always puts his plaster on the wrong side of his trowel..)

And here he is again, plastering his face…

connected!

The old south window is gone, as well as the foundation below it and the cob bench as well.  So now the two structures are officially connected!!!  The feeling of the space has now completely changed, with the original room and the addition one large room.  It feels so big and open, and its exciting to be able to now visualize what the completed space will feel like.  I imagine sitting at the (future) table, drinking coffee, the wood stove warming our home and our bodies, Leo running around…

There is still so much more to do, but its looking so nice…

the new south wall

 

goodbye cob bench!

Here’s a photo of the preparation for the sub floor.  Mike and Greg used chunks of urbanite and old bricks, and then gravel on top of that.  After some tamping the base is ready for the sub floor mix!  The mix they used for the sub floor was 4 parts sand to 1 1/4 parts clay slip, made from the local clay subsoil.

sub floor base

sub floor!:

I brought Leo out again for an afternoon, so he could help out mixing the sub floor.  Thanks for your help Leo!:

update on the addition

Wow…once again I am way behind in updating this blog.  I’ve recently realized that one of the biggest changes in my life, now that I’m a mama, is that spending all day each day with Leo causes me to live totally in the present.  I think so much less about the past, and in a strange way less about the future as well.  Although I still make long term plans and spend time figuring out what we’ll be doing next year, and the years after, for the most part when I am with Leo my mind is here only.  When we are playing together, I am allowing myself to be fully present, enjoying our connection together.  This has been a welcome change, but I’ve found that I’ve been pushing other things off to the side these days.  I hardly answer my phone…or respond to emails…or update this blog… Even though the addition is looking totally sweet!!!
I wanted to share some pictures from this summer.  Here are some pictures from July, when Greg and Mike spent a week working together on the addition:

a huge overhang on the east side, for an outdoor cooking space, and a crazy dormer that was our solution for connecting two very different roofs:

Mike decking the dormer:

Light straw clay!:

and here are some pictures from early August, when Greg spent another week working:

windows!:

counters:

Greg finished up the layers of the living roof that week, and even got all the topsoil up there!

EPDM rubber pond liner:

cedar slab wood fascia:

doors:

overhang:

Looking from the east has become my favorite angle from which to gaze at the house.  I am in love with the dormer, with it’s window like a great open eye peering east, and the crazy roof line.  Its the kind of thing you can’t really plan, a harmony between all the different angles, curves, and straight lines that is better than what a more intentional roof line would have been.

So, this week Greg and Mike are able to spend a few days doing some more work on the addition.  Greg went out there yesterday and starting working on the straw bale sections of the walls.  Today I brought Leo out for half the day, and I had the opportunity to do something I never thought I would do – take apart a section of the original foundation!  Greg starting removing some of the cob around the large south double window and some of the foundation below it.  And then I got to spend a while deconstructing the foundation.  What an odd thing it was, to bash the dried, solid cob from some of my first foot mixes for this house.  And to piece by piece remove the chunks of urbanite I had so carefully placed years ago.  Honestly, it was a lot of fun.

Here are some pictures from today:

making custom sized bales:

more bales:

taking apart the foundation:

Bastet observes from the balcony:

my last view before leaving today:

the new living roof has so much life already!:

Also, here’s a video of some of the foundation deconstruction:

Framing!

This post is long overdue, as most of these pictures are from early June.  But these days I experience time much differently.  And my body has recently been under attack from lyme disease!  I’m feeling much better now, but for a good month I didn’t feel like doing anything more than I had to.  But now that I’m over that (hopefully?), I’m excited to share some more pictures of the addition!

Once our wood was delivered from the sawmill Greg got right to work on the post and beam framing, after doing a little cob with Leo:

Which Leo found to be very tasty:

Our 8×8 posts were huge and heavy, especially since the wood had not yet dried out.  Greg notched them all, and managed to get them all up onto the concrete piers by himself, using a wheelbarrow to slide them into place!

Notching:

The first few posts!

My friend Steve came out to help with the post and beam, and also framed out the walls for the kitchen area with rough cut 2x4s, for the light straw clay walls.

Placing one of the beams:

wall raising!:

Here you can see the decorative rafter end detail:

east wall!:

Here’s Greg placing some rafters:

A fancy rafter detail for the last rafter on the west side:

Greg & Kat decking the roof:

It will just be a small step from the balcony onto the living roof!  I think that feature is one of my favorite parts of the addition’s design, especially since this new roof will allow us to finally be able to have easy access to the higher existing roof.  Until now there has been no easy way to get up there!

All this work was from early June, but last week Greg and our good friend Mike spent another week working on the addition, finishing the rest of the roof framing and decking, among a lot of other things.  I will post more photos soon but for now here’s one photo of a view from the east (look how tall the corn got!):

 

Bees… and an addition!

A few weeks ago Greg, Leo, and I went out to the cob house for a couple days, to rescue parts of the south and east walls from Anthophora abrupta… “miner bees!”  Those sweet mama bees were building little nests in my cob wall – beautiful nests with strange looking earthen tubes extending from the openings.  These bees are a common problem for cob structures in our area; our friends’ cob house nearby had almost turned into a sacrificial bee village until they covered over their earthen plaster with a lime plaster.  Since the lime plaster they haven’t had a single bee drill into the cob!  So while we were at the cob house we plastered over the bee nests with some lime…

lime plaster!

While we were there we also did a little planning… for an addition!  We hadn’t decided yet where we would spend this winter, and after some thought we decided that adding on a small room to the cob house would make it a nice place to spend the winter as a family.  So…

This is a rough sketch of the addition, which will be post and beam framing with some straw bale walls and some slip straw walls.  In the drawing the green is the existing cob house, and the blue is the addition, which will be to the south.  We’ll remove the large south facing double window, as well as the foundation underneath it, and that will be an opening to the addition.  The new room will be an  eating area and small kitchen area (with cooking space outside under a large overhang).  The new space will have a living roof that, at one story tall, will be at about the same height as the existing balcony, allowing the cats (and us humans) to walk right from the balcony onto the green roof.  I’m pretty excited about the design!

Greg had a little bit of time off work, so we were able to get started last Thursday.  Reflective in a way of some of the changes in my life, this project is a bit different from the last.  One of the biggest changes in my life as a mother is time.  I can’t even imagine now what it was like to have free time, time to work on projects!  When I see people working quietly in their gardens, reading a book in the shade, or doing just about anything…alone, I look at them with awe, and wonder when my life might include moments like those again.  For now I am appreciating the joy of my relationship with my amazing, cute and curious Leo.  When he’s older maybe we can even build some things together!  So, the challenge with this project will be time- how quickly can two adults and one nine-month-old create a small naturally built addition, without much money?

On Thursday Greg (who is doing most of the work while I watch Leo) only got in a couple hours of work, which was mainly unloading tools and then staking out the site and starting work on the drainage trench.  By the end of the day on Friday the trench was completely dug, graded, and filled with a couple inches of gravel!  We tied in to my existing rubble trench in a couple different spots, and it was satisfying to have the chance to peer into that trench once again, seeing all the layers just as they were so long ago.

On Saturday the drain pipe was laid, the trench filled with the rest of the gravel and then leveled off, ready for the foundation.

Here’s Greg doing a water test – flooding the trench with water to watch how it flows, making sure the water moves quickly down the slope:

Connecting to the existing drainage trench:

Setting in the drain pipe:

Placing rocks around the drain pipe to make sure it stays put in the center of the trench once more gravel gets dumped on top:

Complete!

Sunday Greg cleared the rest of the topsoil and built some concrete forms for the piers that will support our posts (we’re getting some 8″x8″ posts from the local sawmill).  These concrete piers are one of my compromises for this projects, but they are part of what is allowing this room to be built quickly, with structural integrity.  The rest of the foundation is made of urbanite (reclaimed concrete chunks) and salvaged brick.

Concrete piers:

On Monday I left town for a few hours, and when I got back Greg had almost finished dry stacking the urbanite section of the foundation!  He’s so fast!  The rest of the day we worked on the foundation some more – Greg finished the urbanite and we also spent a lot of time gathering bricks from when the old house on the property was demolished.  We spent a lot of time chiseling away the old mortar…

bricks and chipped mortar rubble…

On Tuesday I got to spend most of the day working!  Greg watched Leo while I worked on the brick section of the foundation.  I had never laid bricks before, and had always wanted to try, so I was looking forward to it.  It was really slow going at first as I got my technique down, but was much faster by the end of the day.  I laid bricks until I ran out of mortar right as the sun was setting.  I like that the foundation will be two different materials, as it designates the two different wall systems and the two different “rooms.”  The straw bale walls will be on the urbanite, and create the eating/living room, and the slip straw (also called light clay straw) walls will be on the brick foundation, creating the kitchen area.

leveling

Throughout all this, Leo has been our big helper:

Today it was raining, and we had some errands to take care of, so we left town for the day, but tomorrow we’ll be back to building!

7 Day Cob and Straw Bale Workshop!

One of my life-long dreams has been to design and build my own home.  When I was a kid I remember watching This Old House and The New Yankee Workshop with my father every weekend, asking him questions the whole time, about the projects, the tools, etc.  But my main question always was, “Can we do that?!”  And watching my dad build things in the garage was one of my favorite activities, and the smell of sawdust still is comforting to me now, just as it was then.  The idea that we could build all these amazing and beautiful things on our own was completely fascinating to me as a child, I was so inspired.  My dad had a huge wooden drafting table, and an old metal toolbox full of stencils and special architectural pencils, and I loved playing with them.  I spent hours and hours with that drafting table, carefully designing houses.  Houses which always included secret hidden rooms that only children could access- usually behind the kitchen cabinets.  The first thing I was “going to be when I grow up” was an architect (except for any time after I came inside from picking flowers.  Then I always decided I would definitely be a florist.)

After a lifetime of public schooling and television and our culture of “experts”, those ideas and dreams had mostly gone away.  It wasn’t until I had dropped out of college and was living in a barn on an organic farm that all these dreams started to return.  Could we really build our own house?  Could we really create the lives we want for ourselves?

Over the years I had read some books.  The Cob Builders Handbook.  The Hand Sculpted House.  Built By Hand really got me!  I’ve flipped through the pages of that book so many times that they are all falling out.  What I really wanted was to take a workshop, but every time I looked for one, which wasn’t all that often, they were always on the west coast.  A few months after finally moving to the land I had bought with three other people I saw a flyer somewhere for a local cob workshop.  I was so excited and signed up right away!

So, in May of 2009 I helped build this cottage:

That week long workshop was an inspiring experience for me, and gave me the confidence to finally start on my own cob house.  I spent the rest of the year helping out on building projects whenever I could, and started scavenging materials for my own home, which I was sketching over and over again on graph paper.  And then in 2010…

I’m reflecting on all this because…

We’re having a week long cob workshop here in Durham in June!

You can check out the info about it here.  Greg and Mike taught the workshop I took in 2009, and they will be the instructors for this workshop, where people will be constructing a cob and straw bale meditation studio and garden wall.  Mike and Greg both apprenticed with the Cob Cottage Company in Oregon, and are awesome instructors.  I’ll be there with Leo to help out and hang out, and my friend Julia is going to be cooking some awesome food with local produce!  I’m pretty excited, it should be a lot of fun!

Reflecting back, not only did taking a workshop give me new building skills, ideas, and experience, but I also made life long connections and friendships with some amazing people.  And then the following year I taught my own cob workshop and once again got to make connections with awesome people that I am grateful to still have in my life.  I’m looking forward to once again getting to participate in another workshop setting and meet new and interesting people.

Building brings people together!

 

home birth in a cob house

I’ve been meaning to write a new post for a while now, this blog has been so neglected lately.  My days have been full now in a whole new way than before, and I’ve been adjusting to my new life as a mother.  I’m continually surprised by how quickly my days fly by, and by how quickly my son grows and transforms before my eyes!  At first a fresh and tiny human with mostly closed eyes, new to such a bright, dry, sensation filled world.  And now a huge, squirming, laughing, rolling, “talking”, snuggling four month old boy!

My son was born on the last day of August, just before the sunrise.  Born downstairs, right at the foot of the ladder.  And then immediately into my arms for an hour of uninterrupted snuggling and staring into each others’ eyes.  I’ve never worked harder in my life than I did that night!  So many people seem impressed by all the hard work and physical labor that goes into building your own home with natural materials.  But I’m impressed by all these mothers out there!  If you can give birth, and make a new person from your very own body, I’m convinced you can create your own shelter.  We are stronger than we know!

Leo the day he was born!

After the sun came out and in through the southern windows, allowing me to fully see and study every part of my perfect little boy, I also had an appreciation for my environment at that moment.  The first face my son saw was my own, and the first place he knew was the house that I, along with many other people, had sculpted by hand.  When Leo was born he cried, but only for just seconds.  After that he was calm and alert, quietly taking in his new world.  What a special place to be born, in a home whose walls radiate out all the love with which they were built.

Leo and I hardly left the house for a couple magical weeks as we got to know each other more deeply.  Sadly, for the most part we have now been living about an hour away from our sweet cob house, to live where my partner is currently working on a building project.  I miss my house, and look forward to spending more time there some day soon.  And I have plans to finally complete all the unfinished tidbits come spring – finish the exterior plaster, the final layers of roofing for the small eastern roof…install a front door!  I’m definitely craving some creative time spent building, and have even been dreaming lately about some additions to the house.  A bedroom to the east?  Small kitchen to the north?  Oooh, the possibilities are endless.  But right now my time is not!  Soon enough, soon enough…

My son Leopold, born at home August 31st, 8 pounds, 4 ounces and oh so perfect:

4 months old!