Dave works the chisel and mallet
This past weekend, my sub-community at Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage hosted a timber framing workshop weekend. The savvy Tom Cundiff of Edgeworks came out and instructed us how to design, lay out, and join roundwood timbers. It was a lot of fun, exhausting, inspiring, and definitely educational.
Here’s a little slideshow of the sequence of construction activity on the Wabi-sabi kitchen. It’s from fall 2009 through the present. Notice that we’re up to the timber frame (and that’s why we need help from inspired carpenters, timber framers, and builders alike!) Here ya go:
Thomas and Ali plant garlic in the garden
UPDATE (2/21/11): We have fulfilled our work exchange needs for the 2011 season. Thanks to all applicants!
The Wabi-sabi sub-community (Ziggy, April, Thomas, and Ali) at Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage is seeking individuals to help with expanding and maintaining our organic gardens, increasing our local food production, and building our cooperative kitchen for the summer of 2011. Read ahead to learn more!
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.)
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.