Sunday, April 16, 2017

2016 Summary

Life has a way of slowing down your plans. We never really got around to building, but put in more trees and plants and made some more observations.

Last May we had planned the layout and were ready to hire a local excavator to dig a 4ft deep, 72'x36' area out for the first 2 rooms of the house. We set up a time frame to dig and asked the local excavation expert to let us know ahead of time when he was available so we could be there.  He called and said he'd be ready to do the dig tomorrow, and since we live over an hour from the land, we told him we couldn't drop everything on that short notice, so we'd let him know when things slowed down.

Well, we got swamped with work and grandbabies, eventually I sent him an email asking when he could dig, and asked him to give us a few days notice so we could get sitters. He never returned our email, so we thought we'd wait for the heat to let up and try again when things cooled down and our workload decreased.

September rolled around, and we had taken the grandbabies to the Mother Earth News Fair in Seven Springs Pa. We took the kids to Uncle Mud's booth to play around and learn about cob building. We ended up spending most of our time there because his classes were so informative. Specifically, there was a workshop on using pallets stuffed with mud-dipped straw as walls. Initially we'd intended to do tires, then thought earthbags and strawbales, but now this idea really was appealing.

This is the first and only place I'd ever heard of
 this technique. Essentially, you create a bucket of thin clay 'slip', the consistency of maybe a smoothie, grab a handful of straw, swish the straw around in the clay smoothie then stuff it inside the slats of the pallet. As you fill up the pallet with straw, you use pieces of broken pallet to close off the open parts of the bottom of the pallet to keep in the straw. Let that dry and you have a hundred-pound panel that will make a nice, sturdy, insulated wall and a base on which to apply cob and plaster. Stand them on end on top each other, preferably on a couple of earthbags stuffed with gravel to keep moisture away, bolt them to a post and cover with cob and plaster.

I spoke with Uncle Mud for a bit about what we were planning to build, and his first recommendation was to start small. Good advice. We were beginning to wonder if we would be able to get this thing built living an hour away and Andrea starting a new, full time job in Columbus, and me home with the 14 y/o in K12 online school. Starting out really small had a lot more appeal and is a lot more do-able in the few months' of summer vacation time frame we'll have to work in this spring. So we went back to the drawing board.

The plan now is to make something just big enough for us to 'camp out' in next winter and start some seeds the next spring. Sometimes delay is a good thing.


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