Progress report: interior tour

To show where we're at these days, I took some pictures to show how tall the walls are. They are all about the same height, all the way around the building, but because the floors are at different levels from the roof, and the roof has slopes, there's a lot of variability in how far we have to go yet.

Here's Melissa, looking bundled for the cold by the front door. Notice the arch is getting close, and that we've finished the little arched window next to it. You can see we're almost to the roof in the this SE corner.



Here's Melissa under the big round window in the east living room wall (about 8 feet to the left of the first photo). Another interesting thing in this photo is the line in the wall just below her shoulders. that change in color is about when winter started... Things have been drying differently since it started raining around here. That's also where we had a bit of mold show up on the surface of the wall. If it's still there when we're ready to start plastering, we'll bleach it off.


Here's where we're at with the main bedroom east windows. The arches are just starting to get formed, and that seems to be going well. There's actually just two pieces of glass for those 4 windows... the first and third columns just go up the middle of the two sides of glass.




Here's the long view of the western kitchen wall. This is the tallest cob wall we've got so far, but we've still got a ways to go. Up there above the loft, there will be a *big* window, so we don't have to fill in that whole space, which is nice. You can also see the in-the-floor storage area (we're calling it the yukashita - the Japanese word for 'under-the-floor' storage) that will have a trap door on it, and you can see where the back door is also. Of course, there will be a wall of shelves below the loft, so when the house is done, you won't be able to see through like that.



And here's the northern wall, the bathroom area. You can see the mirror already in place, and those boards above it will be the recessed area for the lights. It will get plastered over later.

You can also see in this photo how much goes on in one layer... which is actually two days of work. See the darker, still wet layer at the top of the wall? that's one layer put on to fill in the 'teeth' created last time, and then another day of work putting the teeth on, to get about 10-12" or so of new cob.