Monthly Archives

March 2015

Mar 29
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Grand Finale: How to Build a Better Outdoor Pizza Oven

By Cob Oven
Homemade Pizza Party

This is the final installment of my outdoor pizza oven building guide!

If you’ve been following along with my “How to Build a Better Cob Oven” series — great! If you haven’t, you can catch up by reading part 1 and part 2. So far I’ve described how to site your new oven and build a shelter, how to prepare and build the foundation, install the hearth, door opening, and build the cob dome itself. So let’s see where we are now… I think it’s time to talk about insulation, plaster, and wrapping things up.

Here’s the final installment of How to Build a Better Outdoor Oven.

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Mar 25
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Sneak Peak: Off-Grid Straw Bale Cabin

By Natural Building Workshops, Straw Bale Building
Porch Roof on Off-Grid Straw Bale Cabin

Wrapping up the framing on the porch roof of the off-grid cabin

How can it possibly be that March is already coming to an end? The passing of time is so utterly mundane of a subject but it’s terribly fascinating to ponder at the same time. I can hardly believe how fast these weeks go by sometimes. I’ve been spending some quality time doing various woodworking projects over the last month, so I’ve got some catching up to do on the blog. For now I wanted to share a couple of photos of the off-grid straw bale cabin we’re helping to build with our friends here in Kentucky. This off-grid house will be the site of our 7 day Straw Bale Workshop this July.

This sweet little cabin is tucked away in the foothills of the Appalachian mountains, and it will be decked out with straw bale walls and clay plaster this summer. Eventually it will have a small off-grid power system and be a comfy little outpost in a beautiful patch of forest.

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Mar 16
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large-dutch-tool-chest

A Simple Dutch Tool Chest for Hand Tool Storage

By Hand Tools, Woodworking
Large Dutch Tool Chest Plans

The finished Dutch tool chest. No Netherlanders were harmed in this process.

I’m not gonna lie. I don’t think I’ve ever had proper hand tool storage. At Dancing Rabbit we had a nice tool shed for a while, which was great, actually. But things never had a proper place in there… and then we moved. And before that shed… well, don’t even ask.

In our current transitional living space, we finally have a makeshift workshop space. (That’s where our new workbench lives.) Which means we can do more woodworking projects. Which means some solid tool storage is even more important than before. Finally, some of my tools have some proper storage. I built a so-called Dutch tool chest recently, and it’s doing a fine job of enabling some order amongst my slowly growing hand tool kit. Check it out…

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Mar 07
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Book Giveaway: America’s Covered Bridges

By Traditional Building, Book Reviews

ACB Jacket.inddCovered bridges are a big source of nostalgia and fascination for many folks in America. Fewer intact examples litter the countryside today than ever before, but once upon a time they were a critical part of early transportation infrastructure. At the time they were built (and today, too), they were engineering marvels, often built by formally uneducated people with simple technology (and definitely nothing in the way of calculators, computers, or load tables.)

Less than 1000 covered bridges remain in service today, but during the two hundred years of covered bridge heyday, over 15,000 were built. America’s Covered Bridges: Practical Crossings, Nostalgic Icons is a beefy hardcover illuminating the source of fascination of the covered bridge in the American landscape.

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Mar 03
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Check This: The Completed Roubo Workbench

By Woodworking
Split Top Roubo Workbench

The newly finished Roubo workbench, made of ash

Our attempt at building a split-top Roubo workbench is, more or less, complete. We put the finishing touches on it over the weekend, and suffice to say, things are feeling pretty good right now. This workbench is going to enable us to do some serious woodworking not just immediately, but likely for a long, long time…

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