This morning we had a mini photo shoot for a possible magazine cover image. Thankfully the weather was just lovely. It was nice to see the house slowly lit up by the beautiful morning sun… If we’re lucky, this photo will actually make the cut. Thanks to Stephen for the photo!

More to come later…

Man, goings-on is a weird word. It just never looks or sounds exactly right. Anyway, there have been a number of these so-called goings-on lately. Here’s the lowdown on what’s been keeping me busy…

By now you know that the cob bed has been completely removed, but the wall has been replastered, and the floor redone as well. Just yesterday, I finished oiling the finish layer of the floor, so now it is curing. I can’t remember how long I waited last year for the oil to cure, but it must have been at least a week. Most of the past month of work on the house has been waiting – waiting for both layers of the floor to dry, for plaster to dry, for oil to cure. The actual work has been quite quick and simple. But we should finally be able to move back into the house very shortly.

The mud room is advancing. We’ve got one new door in place. It’s a pretty nice reclaimed solid wood door that I cut an arch into and fit into a modified door frame. We just finally got a knob on it. Once it’s oiled it’s gonna look really good. The cob wall of the mud room is at head height or higher, and we’ve got a nice triple-glazed (!) window sash buried in the wall above a couple of shoe shelves. This mud room is very shelf and hook-heavy for shoes, jackets, and other small items that frequently come in and out of the house. It’s not too far off from completion. I’m happy with this little addition so far.

As for the kitchen construction… we’ve been seriously slowed down recently because the truck in our vehicle co-op has been out of service. But last week, we finally got our fourth and final load of urbanite for the foundation, including a huge five foot long piece to use as a threshold for some French doors April and I picked up. Speaking of doors, damn are they expensive. We get our doors usually via donation, or at a place called Bayview Building Supply, which sells windows and doors that they get through big auctions. The doors are mostly all new, essentially, but they’re not sold as such. I don’t exactly know their story, but their doors are cheaper than new, but definitely not terribly cheap. I sure do have a hard time plunking down money for doors and windows, although they are an important investment… especially in this climate with our cold winters. I did talk about possibly building some doors earlier, but I decided against it.

To finish it off… I have some sad news. Recently, we destroyed the cob oven. Woe! It was a tough choice, but unfortunately the weather here has been incredibly wet (again) this year, and we’ve been having very scary and large amounts of surface runoff coming quite near to the foundation of the house. We wanted to dig a swale, and unfortunately, the oven was right in the path of where it need to be dug. So it had to go. The integrity of the foundation won over baked bread. Gah. Well, I guess it was always going to be a temporary thing, but I had at least hoped the oven would last a couple of years.

Well, that’s about all for now…

We had some extra earthen plaster from re-plastering the portion of the house where the cob bed was, so we slapped it on the oven in the temporary outdoor kitchen. And then I made this little whale mosaic. I kinda like how it came out!

earthen acres: Danielle is building a very small cob cottage and documenting her progress. So far her home has a completed dry-stacked (and beautiful!) urbanite foundation with the first layers of cob on the wall. I am excited to see how this little structure gets on.

mud for everyone: I haven’t ventured very far into Erica Ann’s blog, but damn if that cob loop-de-loop isn’t cool! Check out the June 1 post.

clay sand straw blog: I’ve enjoyed perusing these folks’ website and the wealth of photos of their building projects, so I anticipate future updates on this new blog.

Any others you would like to share? Comment and lemme know.

A section of the second course

Wabi-sabi is moving slowly but surely towards completing our urbanite foundation for the kitchen. I’ve gotta say… stacking stone is one of the things I’d really love to learn well with an experienced builder. Granted, urbanite and stone are different animals (and stone comes in many shapes and forms itself), but I often stumble over what is “good enough” when it comes to stacking the material. I have a good handle on what is “acceptable” but still — there are so many cases when you sacrifice one thing for another if you just can’t make the perfect fit or find the exact right piece. How to balance that is something I’d love to learn more about…

Anyway, we’ve got 90% of the second course stacked and mortared with our sand/lime mix, and about half of the third course stacked and waiting for mortar. We have to go for yet another run to the yard to pick up more material — this will be the fourth trip with a truck and trailer to haul back a couple more tons of busted concrete. Yow! We’re really eating it up.

Third course awaiting mortar

I’ll be happy once the foundation is done. It’s not that we’ve spent a lot of time working on it, but we have an inconsistent schedule with all of the other projects each of us is working on. Usually we work on it one or two days a week, depending on the weather, as well.

Nice place to nap?

We made a small extension on the trench on the SE corner of the site. We dug out the trench two feet wider to build a sort of tiny east-facing vestibule (”eastibule”) — or an airlock, similar to the addition I am building on the house. It’s a space big enough for two doors to open opposite each other, where you can take off your shoes and hang coats in winter.

The "eastibule" foundation

Once we get our last load and put in a few more days on the foundation, I reckon it will be done… and then…. timberframing.

Unbelievable. This is the third incredibly wet year running now. Rain, rain, rain. It really gets old. (And mucky.) But that didn’t stop us from the cob bed and bench demolition project inside of my house. I had been dreading this task for a while now, but boy am I glad we got it accomplished! And it wasn’t nearly as bad as I thought it would be to destroy thousands of pounds worth of cob… but normally, you cannot really say that of cob, because it is so incredibly tough and resilient!

Last week, April, Snack (Wabi-sabi’s work exchanger), and I went about destroying the cob bed in the house. We moved out into a tent, and shoved everything in the house into one corner, protecting it with a tarp. Taking apart that bed was not going to be a clean task.

With pick axes in hand, we took our first swings at the bed. The pick axes left hardly a mark! Those first 8 inches of material were bone dry and nearly as tough as rock. It took serious effort to dislodge any significant amount of material, with lots of sweat and pauses for achy bodies. This video should give you an idea just how strong of a building material cob is:

Thankfully, the random rubble mixed into the bed made it slightly easier to remove larger pieces at a time. But I don’t wish this task upon anyone. Taking apart cob is really, really difficult.

As we got further into the project, we hit stovepipe (literally). It was impossibly to avoid not destroying the stuff, unfortunately. It was sad to see but it had to be done.

As we got deeper down, the job suddenly became easier. The material was actually wet about halfway down, around and underneath the stovepipe. Hm! It seemed as though the bed never dried after it was built. Without exposure to the sun and wind, cob takes a long time to dry, especially in a humid environment, and especially when it’s in a thick form. I’m still guessing that it never fully dried, but it could also be that the stovepipe condensed in the cold, and the moisture ran down throughout the mass, making it damp over winter. Either way, this cob crumbled when we hit it.

Seeing this problem, I was relieved that we were removing the bed from the house. I knew that this would have caused serious problems down the line. A damp bed against the exterior walls of the house? Not good. Around the edge of the bed, the straw in the cob walls was actually rotten at the ends. It smelled like mold. Mold = really not good. Yeck.

Archaeological dig or cob demolition?

Destroying the whole bed and bench ended up taking about a full day of work. We carried all of the cob out in buckets and filled a whopping dozen 55 gallon drums full of the stuff. That’s a lot of material!

When all was said and done, it was a relief. Next up? Replastering the wall where the bed was, redoing that part of the floor, and building a wood bed frame…

Counter space with spice shelves, and stove to the right

We’ve moved into the new temporary outdoor kitchen. All of the food, utensils, pots, and pans got carried over last week, and we set up the ol’ single burner rocket stove outside the door. We’ve finally got a roof over our heads (a truck topper roof, no less), sufficient counter space, the faithful filing cabinet for rodent-proof storage, high shelves for extra canning jars, plenty of hooks for utensils and cast iron pans, rain catchment with a gravity-fed sink, a big hotbox/seat/counter, and a very experimental three burner lorena-style stove inside.

It’s a really fun and funky interior space. It’s well organized with lots of space to hang and store items. The floor is gravel from a leftover and unfinished building project from a previous Dancing Rabbit member. We adapted the space to build our kitchen. The materials cost next to nothing, since 95% of the stuff was just lying around here already: lumber, old metal, windows, etc.

Stove in NE corner, sink in NW (with drain to buckets underneath), hotbox on far right

The interior stove is based on a lorena-style stove, with some modifications. There are three spaces for pots, which fit directly into the holes. The first hole is directly above a short heat riser. Surprisingly, it’s the second hole that is the hottest, though. The gases snake through the mass under each pot and out a chimney. The mass of the stove itself is a bunch of urbanite and a weird cob mix that Thomas made up: sand, clay, straw, some freebie refractory cement, and vermiculite. I have no idea what the ratios are (and I doubt he knows either). The first few fires proved slow to actually boil water, but since it’s dried out more, it has improved. I will have to do another timed test to see how long it takes to boil a kettle of water. (The first time is was a full 30 minutes – eek!)

Three burners and a lot of mass...

The kitchen has been really fun to use. It’s a good little space (under 100 square feet). Here’s a shot of the lovely Snack flipping a skillet cookie outside in the sunset two nights ago. (He caught it, but unfortunately it kinda fell apart in mid-air — look closely and you can see cookie particles flying off!)

Broken up mostly into chapters devoted to different building elements, including earth, stone, wood, and thatch, Yoshio Komatsu’s collection of photographs is pleasing to navigate and is definitely aimed at visually stimulating the reader. Each chapter includes a short introduction, with some extra brief text interspersed midway describing each element and its building and/or cultural significance. Additionally, each gorgeous photo is clearly captioned with a location and brief description.

Let’s be clear. This book is mostly about Komatsu’s photos. Although the text does provide some helpful background information, don’t expect an explanation on how to thatch your own roof, for example. There’s not that much in the way of information about the people and cultures who built these homes, either. The photos mostly speak for themselves and provide much in the way of enlightenment. The variety of content is impressive, too, with everything from adobe homes in the American southwest to house boats on the Niger River in Mali.

Built By Hand will put your imagination to the test when you consider the ingenuity of traditional peoples and their adaption of incredibly basic building elements to craft truly exquisite homes and structures. Can hyper-civilized society, with its seemingly endless concrete, shiny steel, and artificial-infested houses and buildings learn something from the vernacular building still practiced?

Whatever the case, this book is definitely inspiring, especially if you like to ponder natural building design. I love to flip through the pages and wonder what a house in my own neck of the woods would look like if it were truly local and hand-built…

Can this plant lower indoor humidity levels?

April and I have been doing research about how to lower the indoor humidity levels in the house. Recently, the outdoor temperatures skyrocketed to the mid-80s after several weeks of 60 degree temperatures, so everything is really humid and damp… Including the house.

So humid, in fact, that mold started to develop all over the earthen floor, especially around the rugs. We took all the rugs out and I mopped the floor with water, but that was a bad choice… since it didn’t dry easily. A couple days ago, we wiped the floor with vinegar to help kill the mold, and set up a box fan to blow air over the floor (thanks to our neighbors for lending us electricity!) to help it really dry out.

We borrowed a digital thermometer and humidity reader thingy, and it read humidity levels of around 80% inside the house! Hopefully it wasn’t totally accurate… But nevertheless, it’s clear we need to rectify this humidity situation. We definitely don’t want a moldy living environment.

Since we don’t have electricity to run a dehumidifier, April has been researching ways to decrease indoor humidity levels through other means. There’s big silica gel bags that you can hang up to soak up moisture from the air, and then heat up/bake later to dry them out to reuse… But who wants big bags of weird silica gel hanging in their house? We might have to do it if the humidity stays constant, but I thought this was the most interesting possibility….

Air plants – can they reduce indoor humidity?

Air plants! Huh? Plants of the genus tillandsia grow in tropical regions and thrive without soil or root systems – they gather moisture and nutrients from the air itself.

All moisture and nutrients required by the plant is absorbed directly through the leaves by means of the tiny silver scales which cover the plant. The thin walls of these scales permit water to enter the leaves, but prevent its escape. The silvery colour of the scales also helps the plant remain cool by reflecting a portion of the sunlight that reaches the plant…. As you might expect, a plant that is able to cling to the top of a tree, and supply its needs from rain and dust is quite easy to take care of. If they are placed where they will receive bright filtered sunlight and normal room temperatures tillandsias demand very little else. Their need for water can be supplied by either frequent misting, or for those who cannot remember to mist a plant every few days, the entire plant can simply be immersed in room-temperature water for about half an hour every week to ten days. This will permit the plant to absorb all the moisture it will require for the next week or so.

Check out more about tillandsia here. Presumably, if you place the air plant in a humid or moist environment, such as in a bathroom or near a kitchen sink, you don’t even have to worry about misting the plant. Is is then safe to assume that if your whole house is humid that the plant will thrive by capturing some of that moisture from the air, and in effect, lowering your home’s humidity levels? Maybe… but we are so intrigued by the possibility that we just purchased a dozen tillandsia.

Hopefully these plants will help to keep the house drier. If not, it’s still an interesting experiment…

Do you have any ideas about how to passively lower indoor humidity levels? If so, let me know!

Image credit: HK James Ho

I have not been super pleased with the clay/sand mortar I made for my own home, so I haven’t been pushing for a mud mortar. It wicks moisture big time and was a pretty big issue over winter and into the early spring — in those early days of spring, earthworms had managed to tunnel through the mortar into the house! (The mortar has since dried out. I think it was mostly wet from snow contact against the foundation over winter.)

Anyway, we decided we were willing to try a lime mortar, a 3:1 sand/lime mix to plug in areas around the foundation where posts will be set. I imagine we will end up mortaring most of the foundation, too. In this first course of urbanite, we made a chunky gravel/lime (3:1 gravel/lime mortar) mix to stuff cracks between pieces of concrete to fill the gaps.

We have been using some fairly giant pieces — our foundation is a whopping 24″ wide. So far, I’ve been pleased with how it’s progressed. Thankfully, we don’t have to completely worry about a level foundation. However, we are being careful to be level around those areas where the posts will sit, since we will have to create some kind of flat wooden sill for the posts to attach to.

I hope this lime mortar holds up a bit more sturdily than the mud mortar in my house. It will probably wick moisture as well (concrete wicks moisture, too, so it’s hard to avoid), but probably not as easily. The foundation will be three courses high, so we still have a ways to go!