Happy New Year!

With the turn of the new year I'm encouraged by ever expanding interest in ecological building. There is clearly a surge of interest in building small, and using local, minimally processed materials. It's exciting! I'm looking forward to documenting the projects of my colleagues and I on this blog as the year unfolds.

The 2013 workshop schedule will be posted in the next few weeks, so check back. We are offering multiple workshops in Durham/Chapel Hill, and likely other locations including Tennessee and New York's finger lakes.

This photo was taken in the house we built in Durham and it's one of the best pictures I took this year. I feel like this photo captures the building's warmth and cheerful feeling.

The bathroom's walls are finished with a lime plaster, which is water resistant, tough, and has a charming hand made texture. lime can be used over various substrates, and in this case it's the final layer on a stud, lath, and plaster wall.

The ceiling is tongue and groove pine, and the shower is ferrocement. You can read about building the shower in detail in an older post on this blog.

Interior plaster

Natural plasters are great for creating hand made finishes on conventionally built walls. Plaster has more soul and fewer toxins than paint and doesn't require highly finished drywall.

This purple plaster is made from dried pottery clay, lime, sand, wheat paste, and a small amount of chopped straw. It will dry to a less saturated, lighter purple gray in a few days. Below is the opposite corner of the room, and mud room.

 

Earthen Acres Addition

This week Greg and I worked on the addition to Danielle's cottage at Circle Acres. She built a unique two-story cob cottage two years ago after taking our first workshop. Her building was truly tiny, with an interior space of 8'x8' on each level.

Here is a photo of Greg laying the earthen sub-floor at the back door threshold. They've added a substantial but modest living room, and a cozy little kitchen. The addition is built with a hefty pine frame and strawbale and light straw clay infill. You can read all about the construction of the cottage at Earthen Acres.

Outdoor Kitchen

Here are a couple photos of the outdoor kitchen I built at the Food Literacy Project in Louisville, KY last year. I asked them to send me a couple recent photos because I wanted to see how it's looking these days now that it's no longer a beat up work site. It looks pretty good!

The Food Literacy Project is a non-profit partner to a sustainable vegetable farm on historic acreage in Louisville, KY. They run a variety of programs for Louisville youth that center on the field-to-fork experience of harvesting fresh vegetables and cooking...now in their beautiful outdoor kitchen!

Durham Addition

We've been moving right along on the addition at Carlton Ave in the past few weeks. Here's Greg staining the board siding, and battens on sawhorses. Board and batten is a classic, practical, and inexpensive siding option very common in the country, less so in downtown Durham. The rustic aesthetic is catching on in cities these days though, it seems to be following the local food/urban chicken movement, in line with a growing appreciation for all things rural.

Also, the boards didn't come from Home Depot, but from a charming sawmill about 40 miles from town. So we're supporting a local family run mill as well as getting a beautiful product.

Paul's Cabin

Here is the little cabin we worked on during my straw bale workshop last week in Schoharie County, NY. The building is perched near the edge of a ravine in the woods behind my friend Paul's house. He will use it as a retreat cabin, for writing/painting, and a guest cottage.

The building is not completely finished in this photo, and it likely still isn't. We did this in one week and Paul will spend time this fall on the finishing details.

The walls are framed entirely with salvaged lumber and timbers. The north wall is a post and beam frame made from old barn timbers and the other walls stud framed or something in between. We worked with what we had and improvised the layout to fit the materials on hand. We did buy new lumber to frame the floor and roof though.

The north, east, and west walls are strawbale and plaster and the south wall is a straw-clay infill. The floor and roof are not insulated but can easily be finished in the future.

I managed to not get any pictures of the south/porch side, (probably due to the steep drop-off) but there is a glass door to the porch and two big windows, which admit a lot of light.

Straw Bale

We have room for a couple more folks to participate in the straw bale workshop August 10-12 in Summit, NY. Check out the link and get in touch if you're interested!

Preparing for the upcoming workshop has me reflecting on previous bale projects, so here's a photo from a build I worked on a few years ago. The bales have been installed and we were trimming the walls and filling gaps with straw. The orange helmet is mostly for ear protection because we were using a chainsaw to cut, shape, and trim bales.