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.
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 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.)
I’ve been pondering a possibility for the past week or so. Last year, I started up a new blog dedicated to my latest building project, a sub-community kitchen here at Dancing Rabbit that I’m working on with a few other folks. However, I’ve been finding it difficult to want to maintain two separate websites, although in theory I like the idea of the content for each website being devoted to each particular project. It just seems more organized, you know? But it’s really hard to want to upkeep two pretty regular blogs… well, regularly.
And so I ask you readers: do you think that I should combine The House That Millet Built with The Year of Mud, for the sake of simplicity? Or should I keep them separate, for the sake of organization?
It should be fairly straightforward to have a kitchen subsection on this website, with it’s own set of categories.
Well, what do you think? Would it detract from the straight aim of this blog to start talking about a whole new project?
Here’s a rough drawing of the kitchen design. In this sketch you can get a sense of the shape and arrangement of the building. On the east is a wide covered porch for outdoor cooking in the summer. The building has a sizable greenhouse on the south side for starting seedlings and additional heat in the winter, and a west-facing balcony can be accessed from the loft above the dining area on that side of the structure. There are three roof lines — I think the building sorta looks like a duck in this drawing. Outdoor eating will be on the east, along with a cob oven and perhaps even a cob wall along the north border of our “warren” (plot of land) for privacy / a windbreak / aesthetics / sound protection.
If I could find our floor plans drawing, I would post that too, but I actually want to make a more accurate one now that the trench has been dug. Unfortunately it’s hard to measure the drainage trench when it’s covered in snow. Anyway, expect those soon!
The design for the kitchen is coming together bit by bit. Thomas and I have recently touched upon wall systems in our dicussions, and I expressed my interest in doing the west and north walls of the kitchen in balecob style.
There are but two printed resources for balecob building, both of which are short articles in the Cob Web, which is published by the Cob Cottage Company. The bale cob building technique seems pretty clearcut to me, but I’d love to hear from natural builders who have worked with bale cob and can speak to their experiences with the technique!
If you have bale cob information and experience, please comment on this website! I’d love to hear folks’ opinions on the matter.
Winter is the time for planning for the year ahead, and there’s a number of building-related projects in the works for 2010.
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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.
