why rising earth?

The title of this blog draws from my time as an apprentice at the Cob Cottage Company in costal Oregon. If you spend time with natural building folk, you'll eventually find yourself around a fire, sing silly songs about cob and natural building. Folks usually refer to these oftentimes improvised tunes as "cobsongs". I often sang..."There is a house in old coquille, they call the rising earth, it's been the work of many hands, and you know what that's worth..."

Thursday, June 23, 2011

kitchen coming along..







Here are a few photos of the Food Literacy Project's outdoor kitchen, on Oxmoor Farm in Louisville, KY. It's built on the foundation of the farm's old milk shed. I repaired the concrete last winter, began the framing early in the year, and the kitchen details came together this spring. This project was very much a group effort, with great volunteers, FLP staff, and farmers helping throughout.




This is the stone staircase, which was great fun to build. I'll do a detailed post on building the stairs soon and include the concrete stairs we just poured at the house in Durham.




Here you can see different wood species used in the kitchen. Standing out is the eastern red cedar I used for the cabinets, stairs and railings. The heavy timber posts and beams are white oak, and the roof framing, which you can see below is yellow poplar. All three woods were produced by family run sawmills in central KY. The only bit of pressure treated pine used was for the stair stringers. Unfortunately I had no choice, I couldn't find a good alternative in time. Rot resistant 2x12's are hard to come by.




I put my Dad to work while my family was visiting us in Louisville. He's a great tinkerer/builder guy and built many of the cabinets in the house I grew up in. His first job on site was spending a couple hours transforming a rusty tablesaw from the farmhouse porch into a working tool again. Then he helped me get started building the cabinets.




Many people helped throughout this project. Here is part of the FLP crew working on the brick floor.