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Resources Archives - Page 2 of 4 - The Year of Mud

Nov 24
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Why You Should Read A Pattern Language

By Resources

Before you take your shovel to the dirt and start digging to build your own home, before you even take pen to paper in sketching designs, I advise you to read Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language.

If you want to understand what makes a good building good, and a particular space work well, this book will teach you the “pattern language” derived from timeless architectural problems and their solutions. A Pattern Language presents compelling design practices and ideas that will make your space more functional and pleasant.

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Nov 21
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Help Turtle Island Preserve: Community Raided For Code Violations

By Resources

Turtle Island Preserve

Turtle Island Preserve is an educational center that focuses on primitive and traditional living skills, including natural building. They have been operating for 26 years. Recently, they have been subject to a harsh government raid for apparent code violations.

Once again, the government demonstrates complete hypocrisy and hatred in the face of positive change, and my compassion goes out to Turtle Island.

Read their urgent letter below, and support them by signing this petition!

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Oct 03
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Topsoil Quantity Calculator: How Much Soil For Your Green Roof?

By Resources, Living Sod Roof

Here’s a handy tool if you happen to be building a living roof, or doing berm or other earth construction work. This topsoil quantity calculator will give you an idea of how many cubic feet / yards / tons of soil you will need for your project.

A 30×35 roof at 4″ thickness will require 3.5 tons of soil, for example. Wow.

In building our own green roof, it has been fun to try to guess how many buckets full of dirt we will need to use… although it’s pretty hard to keep track.

Well, there ya go!

Aug 28
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Top 5 Natural Building Reads on The Year of Mud

By Strawtron, Resources

reciprocal roof frameIt’s fun for me to track the content on The Year of Mud to see what people are reading and sharing the most. It is definitely the how-to articles that attract the most attention — here are the top 5 natural building posts on The Year of Mud:

As the building season dies down and time becomes more available to me, I have plans to travel backwards in time to create more how-tos, and detailed posts about all of the building we’ve done this year — timber framing, straw bale building work, etc. Look forward to more articles about our adventures with the new straw bale & timber frame home!

Aug 25
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Rainy Sunday Natural Building Reading

By Resources, Carpentry
Canadian Timber Hewing

How to spend a rainy Sunday… when you’re not doing this…

We finally have a day of rain in the forecast for tomorrow — a 100% chance. I will definitely take it. It has been weeks and weeks of drought here. To celebrate, here are a bunch of fun building links. Perhaps you have your own rainy Sunday coming up. Check out these cool natural building and carpentry websites in your time off:

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Jul 04
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Unique and Interesting Antique Woodworking Hand Tools For Sale

By Timber Framing, Resources, Hand Tools
Millers Falls Boring Machine Bits

Lovely Millers Falls Boring Machine Bits from Jim Bode

There are a wealth of interesting antique woodworking hand tools out there in the world, and thankfully Jim Bode has a great online shop devoted to preserving and reselling some of these beautiful items. I recently received 3 lovely drill bits for our Millers Falls boring machine, a 2″, 1 1/2″, and a unique 1″ bit, all lovingly sharpened and cleaned, and a sheer pleasure to use for the first time. Wow!

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Sep 12
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All About Hand Hewing Beams

By Timber Framing, Resources, Video, Hand Tools

I read a great post last night on the Holder Bros. industry blog about hand hewing beams with broad axes. It’s worth a mention here!

Beams that are hand hewn get a flat face treatment with nothing more than a felling axe and a broad axe. This is how beams were converted from round logs before the age of cheap fuel and portable mills and all that jazz.

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Aug 10
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Earthen Floor Demolition Video

By Earthen Floor, Resources, Video

Here’s yet another video of me destroying something in or around my cob house. This time, I take a pickaxe to the earthen floor inside Gobcobatron. Breaking it up was fairly tough work, but worse is trying to cleanly scoop up the material and carry it out of the house in buckets. Yuck. Well, I’m glad that’s over with, at least! It took a bit more than a day to complete, not without the help of a few hands throughout the process.

Jun 06
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Video: Two Beautiful Low Impact Roundhouses in Wales

By Video, Resources

I was very happy to discover this video on Tony Wrench’s website the other day. It provides a little tour of Wrench’s low impact roundhouse, and Simon Dale’s new house at Lammas, in Wales.

If you’ve done any searching for beautiful natural buildings online, it’s likely you have seen Simon Dale’s original low impact woodland home. But Simon’s got limited images of his new house up, so this video gives a better impression of the design. Check out that killer big greenhouse!

Definitely very exciting to see a bit more of Tony Wrench’s and Simon Dale’s work here. These two have provided me with a lot of inspiration for my own home, and they’ve also consulted me with on some things, too. Can’t thank them enough.

Gorgeous!