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!
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.
I love a good building book for inspiration, especially when it contains photos of inventive and intelligent homes from around 
the world. Imagine houses with six feet-thick seaweed roofs, deep-nestled and hand-carved cave homes, and pigeon-harboring huts made of mud. These and more are all vividly documented in Built By Hand: Vernacular Buildings Around the World, a most inspiring bit of natural building eye candy. Built by Hand is a hardcover collection of photographs by Yoshio Komatsu of traditional buildings of all styles across the globe.
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.
Last week, we set out to make some progress on stacking the urbanite foundation for our kitchen. There were a few things I learned from my own foundation, and a few things we wanted to do differently for this building. At first, we thought we’d want to dry stack the entire thing, but realized we would definitely benefit from some mortar, especially around the area where our giant posts will be sitting on the foundation.
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.)
In April, I went to gather urbanite for the kitchen foundation (which has finally been started as of last week!). Urbanite is, of course, reclaimed concrete from old roads and sidewalks.
I’ve collected and used urbanite for my home, but this time, walking in a giant yard brimming with the stuff, I got a decidedly post-industrial feeling about the whole thing. There was something sorta post-modern about the whole affair: scrambling over giant piles of rubble from dozens of demolition jobs, looking for the right size pieces of concrete to reuse in a completely different sort of building. I imagined that if I didn’t pick through this stuff, it would likely still be there the next year, and the next, and probably until well beyond my life or that of even our current capitalist, globalized society.
For the small mud room addition to the house, April and I are considering making our own door(s). I’m really unsatisfied with most of the commercial doors out there. They really lack character. And it’s tough to find nice reclaimed doors, too.
But trying to dig up information on how to build your own exterior doors (esepecially insulated doors) is pretty tough. So I turn to you, readers – does anyone have links to resources on building your own exterior, insulated doors?
I have a good image in my mind of the door I’d like to build, but my experience with that level of carpentry is pretty nil. (I picture a nice heavy 32″ wide, left handed, solid wood door with two or three layers of wood, or two layers with some kind of insulation between, nice black strap hinges, preferably with some heavy glass in the upper half, and preferably arched.) Guidance is welcome!
Haha. A few weeks ago, a woman from PARADE Magazine contacted me about the grain bin renovation here at Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage. With my email response, I included a link to this website, and the writer decided to feature GOBCOBATRON instead of the grain bin home.
So now 70 million people have read about me (‘Ziggy Liloia’ – I actually almost never use my nickname and last name together) and building my cob house here at Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage. Weird.
Unfortunately, they did not include either a link to The Year of Mud or Dancing Rabbit’s website. But here’s their story on it: Home, Strange Home.
Wabi-sabi has been busy building a temporary outdoor kitchen the past several weeks. Before we really get underway on the ‘for real’ kitchen construction project, we are setting up this outdoor kitchen as a place to cook and eat while we are building. Right now, we’re eating on a sort of glorified tent platform with a simple rocket stove, a filing cabinet for food storage, and a bucket with a spigot for washing dishes. This temporary outdoor kitchen will have, most importantly, walls and a roof, which the current setup does not. It will have rainwater catchment for dish washing water, a lorena-style stove, and hopefully plenty of storage for food. It will not have seating space, however.
Wabi-sabi is the name I and my fellow sub-communitarians have adopted for our collective here at Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage. Our small sub-community formed two winters ago, when several of us gathered to talk about forming a collective to share our interests and work on common projects together, including gardening and possibly building a kitchen to house a food co-op. Our community within a community would also be a tight network of support for each other.
In the spring, we began to more seriously discuss the prospect of building a kitchen, and over the summer we started eating with each other outdoors on Thomas’s warren (a.k.a. leasehold), using a simple rocket stove for cooking. The kitchen design began to take shape over those months. It would be a roughly bean-shaped structure with indoor cooking, dining, and social space, with a sheltered porch for outdoor cooking in the summer, and surrounded by gardens. Since we all have similar ecological ideals, it was not difficult to determine that we wanted to use mostly hand tools to build, and use as many local and natural materials as possible. (We even discussed the possibility of trying not to use any plastic in the construction at all — that would be quite a challenge, though… but it’s possible, I think.)
Hi there, I’m Ziggy. In 2008, I launched The Year of Mud while building my first natural home. This blog is a collection of personal stories and experiences building with clay, straw, and wood over the past 15+ years. A few of the things that get me fired up are natural plasters, timber framing, & Japanese architecture. Since 2012, we’ve been hosting Natural Building Workshops so you can learn essential skills to build your own natural home.
