The Deluge, and other adventures

 Making straw-clay

Well, it’s been quite some time since I’ve written, and I blame the rain.  Yes, it’s all the rain’s fault.  No, but really, it sort of is.  It has been raining on the daily for the past two weeks.  First week it was pouring all day every day, then last week we got epic thunderstorms every afternoon around 4pm that turned the whole building site into a giant mud puddle and sent us scurrying to cover the building in tarps and protect all tools, belongings, and precious building materials (fully coated slip-straw is just straw when it gets rained on).  Also let I remind you, I live in a tent.

So how has this stopped me from writing blog posts?  Well, it hasn’t, but it’s a good excuse.  Let’s just say I’ve been preoccupied trying to keep myself and my belongings dry and free of mold (the belongings, that is).  I have only partially succeeded (damn you mold on my clothes!)

But the rain has certainly not stopped us from getting a ton done on the cottage!  Since timber framing week we have:

Put up the rafters:

     

Made an earthbag (well, gravel bag) stem wall for our building, complete with sill plate on top, drip edge, and fencing material along the sides to stick plaster to later in the future:

Put cleats (parallel strips on the rafters to hold the lath) and lath (small wood strips that go perpendicular to rafters and hold up the insulation and also form the ceiling structure that we will plaster later) on the rafters:

Filled in most of our earthen floor.  Lots of dirt first to bring in up to grade, then gravel layer for drainage, then foam insulation (boo, our perlite and foam peanuts idea didn’t work), then vapor barrier (to keep moisture from the ground from soaking into our earthen floor), then sifted dirt with a little sand in it, tamped with a weighted tamper.  We’ll FINISH finish the floor at the very end!

Put up the framing for our walls.  Put in studs to hold door and window bucks, and future shelves.  These also break up the spans of wall into smaller strips so the straw-clay walls don’t have to span so far.

Made formwork for holding the straw-clay materials as they are tamped into the walls.  The formwork is pieces of 2x8 ft plywood that is screwed onto the framing temporarily and then the straw-clay is tamped into these forms to create walls.  As we move up the wall, we move the formwork up with us.

Are half way done with our stray-clay walls!

AND in addition to all of that successful work, we have also made time to:

·      Try and use foam peanuts as floor insulation only to find they were too springy and have to take all the bags of them back out.

·      Not leave enough give in the vapor barrier for all the heavy dirt and have to re-tape all the edges.

·      Have the edge of the earthen floor get rained on heavily and have to remove all the wet mud in buckets

·      Make clay slip with too many clay chunks in it

·      Slip a bunch of hay before realizing it had seeds and was not the promised straw

·      Have rain wash dirt and mud into a lot of our prepared straw-clay

·      Over tamp the straw-clay walls

·      Under tamp the straw-clay walls

So you can see we’ve been busy.  Hooray for learning curves!  But despite all the rain and setbacks the building is looking awesome, the group has managed to get along throughout and maintain a positive attitude, and we are learning a ton.  And hey, the more mistakes we make, the more we will learn to never make those mistakes again.  Ah, perspective.

PS. i realize these photos don't make it look very rainy, but believe me when it was raining it was not the kind of weather to pull out a camera in!

My timber framing adventures...in video form!

Fun little introduction to our group

Here's a short video we did to introduce everybody and give a peek into our first week here.  (so first week was a couple weeks ago, but I take a while to get organized).  Katie and Emilie did the interview and I put it together with the titles and such on iMovie.  Yay teaching myself basic video editing!  (My more recent iMovie exploits coming soon with the video about our timber framing week).

We raised a house in 6 days!

This week was a crash course in timber framing.  By timber framing, I don’t mean nailing a frame together out of 2x4s.  I mean traditional wood frame joinery with mortises and tenons and wood pegs.  No nails.  No screws (ok, so I think there were 2 screws in the whole thing, just to hold the rafters together at the top). 

So we started on Monday knowing absolutely nothing about timber framing.  In 6 days, with the excellent guidance of our instructor Sarah, we learned new tools and techniques, measured and planned out locations and sizes of mortises and tenons, carved them out, cut out braces and posts and tie beams and plates, and assembled them on Saturday with a crew of volunteers to make our three bent frame for our cottage.

Our awesome, badass instructor, Sarah

It was a challenging week for the group, but we pulled together really well.  Lots of new information really fast, lots of long days (working into the evening with headlamps on Thursday and Friday), a lot of communication and teamwork necessary to make everything come together on Saturday.  And hey, we didn't even want to kill each other by the end!  I'd say that's a good sign for our group.

Gathered around for some instruction

But at the end of the week it was incredibly satisfying to see what we had made.  All the planning and detailed work and long days produced this beautiful, perfectly fitting timber structure that will be seen on the inside of our finished cottage and will be enjoyed for decades and decades. 

There was much good local beer drinking and music playing and singing and skinnydipping to celebrate :)  Perfect end to the week.

Here's some photos from the raising day on Saturday:

Laying out bents 1 and 3 (a bent is 2 posts connected by a tie beam)

More layout

Raising bent 1.  I am the one in the plaid shirt and the blue pants :)

Bracing bent 1 in place

Raising and bracing bent 2

All three bents up!

Bracing bents against each other.  The temporary braces will be removed later.

Look, temporary floor going on top of our floor joists!  Britt is excited about this...

Finished!!!  ...for now.

A little tour of my new home!

It's been a busy week doing the timber framing for our cottage, but I thought I'd at least give you all a little photo tour of my home here.

So here goes:

I really like this photo.

Out through the gardens toward the lake (lake is to the left)

Breakfast under the canopy

Vicki in our little kitchen

The yoga studio out behind our building...and a slackline!  Maybe I'll master it yet...

Looking down toward the lake

The path from the lake

The chicken (and turkey!) coop

I think I have arrived in paradise

Greenhouse, gardens, and the crazy white peacock

...an exhausting paradise, but paradise.  Today is day 3 and I already feel like I have been here for weeks.  We have our adorable little tent village in the woods, are cooking meals for each other, getting to know each other, and starting our first project: a cob oven.

Cob oven!  from left: Britt, Marina, Katie, Karen, Kelley, Vicky

Side note: I must say, I have a bit of trepidation about starting my first blog without Lissa, my excellent writer from our roadtrip blog.  I will just have to tough it out by myself on this one….and you all will have to endure some not as humorous writing.  Although we’re kinda the only ones that think we are funny anyway, so maybe you won’t notice a difference.

Anyway, I am so excited to be amongst such an enthusiastic, passionate, inspiring group of women.  It is a pretty diverse group of different ages and different backgrounds, which is really cool.  I think we will learn a lot from each other’s life experiences.  Everybody has something different to offer, from being a professional dancer, to knowing how to make homemade mole and homemade tortillas, to having a past life as a massage therapist.  Also, I’m being challenged a bit on my cooking skills as we have limited ingredients (at least this first week) and I’m not the most creative cook.  Maybe I will finally learn to be more inventive in the kitchen.  Or just learn some new recipes.  That would be cool. 

So I am happy to be getting into a routine of waking and sleeping with the light, learning new things every day, being outside all the time, and being out in nature.  I could get used to this!

Ok, here are some photos:

Moving heavy logs using leverage!

Makin a really rustic bench

Woo!  I know how to use a drill!

Home sweet home

Our little tent grove.  This is my living space for 4 months!