Feelin' accomplished

Look at our cottage!!  It's got walls and a roof! (minus the slate...)

Straw-clay walls: done.  Bottle wall: done.  Roof decking: done.  Tar paper: done.  Nailers for slate: done.  Adobe blocks: done.

It’s been a busy couple weeks and it feels like we’ve finished a lot of big steps.  Our little cottage looks like a real building now!  It was starting to feel like we would be making and stuffing straw-clay in forms forever, but now we’re done!  Other than patching the holes in our wall (so…our straw-clay tamping technique wasn’t quite perfect), we are finished with the straw-clay portion of our building.

Taking off the formwork for the straw-clay walls

This next week is a BIG week for us here.  We are hosting an eight-day natural building workshop and have 30 people coming to stay here for the week.  It’s exciting to be having such an influx of new people (although a little intimidating to think of playing host to all those people) and to get to learn so many new things in one week.  By the end of the week we will have started plastering the cottage, have a timber frame porch on the front of it, an adobe garden wall made, some kind of sculpture/relief work on the courtyard yard side of the cottage, finish plaster on our cob oven, a second cob oven finished, a cob bench made, and a straw bale wall.

Here we go!!

Our adobe blocks!

Girls from the boarding school on Highland Lake that we had over for an adobe workshop.  They really got into it!!  (literally...)