Here’s a little slideshow of the sequence of construction activity on the Wabi-sabi kitchen. It’s from fall 2009 through the present. Notice that we’re up to the timber frame (and that’s why we need help from inspired carpenters, timber framers, and builders alike!) Here ya go:
The Wabi-sabi kitchen foundation
UPDATE (3/22/2011): This position has been filled – thank you to all applicants!
The Wabi-sabi sub-community (Ziggy, April, Thomas, and Ali) at Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage are seeking individuals to help with building our cooperative kitchen and maintaining our organic vegetable gardens for the summer of 2011.
Roundwood Timber Frame and Natural Building Work Exchange Opportunity for 2011
Ok. So the “Year” of Mud has now been nearly three years since its inception. Whoa. But I like the kinda quaint, although perhaps misleading name of this little project of mine, so I’m sticking to it.
Anyway. 2011 is here! Time flies as fast as ever, if not faster, and before I know it the time has come around again to start planning for the new season. Unbelievable.
A couple of weeks ago, April, Thomas, Ali and I worked on deconstructing a house in town a few miles from Dancing Rabbit. It was pretty grueling work, but I think it was worth the effort. We walked away with a goodly stack of dimensional lumber and some other miscellaneous materials.
Admiring the first post
At long last, the kitchen timber framing has begun. The foundation was completed several weeks ago, and since then, more of the framing design has been hashed out and actually started. So far, we’ve got our first two posts up and plumbed, and the first beam awaits shaping and raising.
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…
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.
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.)
About The Year of Mud
Hi there, I’m Ziggy. In 2008, I launched The Year of Mud while building my first natural home. This website 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. In 2012, we started offering Natural Building Workshops, so you can learn essential hands-on skills to build your own natural home.
