Loft Going Up!

a while back, I notched out the mortises in the main kitchen area post, to be ready for the loft beams:

Yesterday, we put those beams into place, including the madrone center (corner?) post. Here's a photo looking into the notch of the southern beam, with the madrone post sticking through it, (notice the hole for the wooden peg already drilled) and ready for the short, eastern beam to connect them:

And here's what they look like put up:

Here's a view from the living room/entryway area. We are still thinking about whether we'll cut that end off the short beam (the thing hanging over Melissa) or maybe carve something onto it.

Work contiues on

Melissa works everyday at cleaning the clay, which entails digging through the wet, cold slop at the bottom of buckets to get out the roots, bark, and grass that we don't want in the walls. It can get cold doing that, so she's moved the operation to the morning sun spot, the 'french doors' in the kitchen.


I managed to get around to boxing in the clear-story, so that we'll be ready to add lathe and plaster over the top of this plywood, so this wall will look just like the other cob/adobe walls

Lintels and Lentils day!

A couple of lintels went in (yesterday actually) that will be hefty enough to hold up the big weight of the rest of the wall above it.

Here's a photo of the openable window in the toilet area, with the lintel on and getting cobbed in:

Here's another shot of the toilet area, this time looking directly west through the (dirty) non-opening window, with it's lintel in place and some cob on top of it. Those shelves look nice too, huh?

Here's the back door lintel, just having been put in place. That doorway is 7 feet tall.

Jack just thought it seemed too cold out to be cobbing.

Once we got three batches of cob done today, it was into the yurt for some good pink lentils.

Small Milestone (mile-cob?)

Yesterday we officially connected the north wall to the east wall. This is a big deal, because having to build the stone stem wall up quite high in the northeast due to the hillside, that stone wall has been closer to the roof than any other part of the house. Since we've been working around and around the circumference, we haven't gotten close enough to the roof to go over that section...until yesterday.





Here I am putting the official 'all the way around' cob onto to the wall. For height reference, I'm standing on a 5 gallon plastic bucket.

Hardly getting anything done

Besides a recent trip to Colorado to help friends put a hot tub together, I've been sick (I think it is the H1N1 flu, which actually, isn't treating me that bad, just like a normal flu) so that we haven't done any construction work since about 10/27.

Melissa, of course, has kept busy with many other projects, as well as taking care of me. Besides all sorts of little typical stuff (laundry, gardening, etc) she peeled all the hachia persimmons we got from her parents already, and hung them up:




Since I've been napping all day for days, she now finally gets a chance.

Veggie Oil Arrival

Due to an awesome hook up in the veggie powered vehicle world, we were given 145 gallons of waste veg oil, which came in two full 55 gal drums, and a bunch more jugs. They had a forklift to put them on the truck, but I had to get them off up here on the mountain. Each barrel weighs about 420lbs.

Still, they're pretty solid, so I just built a quick simple ramp. Actually getting the barrels on their sides was harder than getting them off the truck. I just rolled them off onto the ground.

Once they were on the ground, Melissa and I were able to stand them up and move them into a position we liked.

That's a lot of fuel!

Progress report:

Thought we'd show off how far we are as things get a bit colder. The kitchen wall (west):

Bathroom northwest walls:

Bedroom interior walls (that's the closet door frame):