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):

Two kinds of wood work

Now that the back door lintel has had the outside hewn off it, and I planed the flat sides smooth, it's time to fit the door frame into it. I started that process by drilling out the wood with a forstner bit, and then started chiseling out the bits to make it square.

In an unrelated scrounging project, I got a batch of oak pallets from a car distributor place. I think they're actually Japanese. I intend to take them apart and see if I can use the thin oak strips, glued together as cabinet fronts in our kitchen. We'll see.

Surface preparations

Besides the cobbing and gardening and rainwater system, we keep working on other aspects of the house. Lately we did a bunch of treatments to different pieces of wood that will be in the house:

Here's Melissa, checking over the first coat of varnish on some of the loft beams. Sometimes you have to scrape off some of the built up gunk before doing another coat.

I oiled the loft post with tung oil, and Melissa thought one coat already looked pretty good:

Then there's the many different shelves, lintels, and covers of stuff that will be made of wood, and need coats of varnish. Melissa does a good job of that stuff:

The big back door lintel (the piece that will be the upper cross piece, holding up the wall above the door) is from a huge log off-cut piece that I had milled a couple years ago. We dragged it up from below the garden, and I had to hachet off the outside layer that was mostly charred from some forestfire, from maybe 60 years ago:

Water Collection Support

Well, it worked. Kind of. The fact that we had 8.1 inches in 24 hours sort of stressed the untried system a bit. I had some blow outs, and a number of slosh overs, but now that things have calmed down, everything is working smoothly. I'll have to rebuild some aspects of the system so as to be able to handle incredible volumes like this, but not right away.

Specifically, I had to change the placement height of one of the 'first flush' systems, so there was better drainage, and the screens in the gutters couldn't really handle the volume, so I got some crud in the tanks. Still, it's all smaller than 1/4", so it's not too bad.

We staye inside most of the day, other than my going to check on the ditches by the road, we had a nice day by the fire. Evening came around, and I got out the sherry, homemade crackers and homemade slightly-dried cheese. Not a bad way to end a wet day.

"First Flush" System: designed, built, and installed!

So, here come the rains, and I wanted the whole rainwater cachement system up and running. The tanks are in place, the tubes are place, and finally, I had to get a 'first flush' system in place.

A first flush system is a way to take that first batch of water that hits the roof and dispose of it before it gets into the tanks. That's where most of the crud is: bird poop, pollen, dust, air pollution, etc.

I did some reading on the inter-tubes here, and decided I could make one myself.

Here's me, waiting for Melissa's help to install the thing (there's one for each tank):

It's 4" PVC, with rubber pipe reducers to a 3" pvc pipe, creating a bottleneck near the top. There's a screw off cap at the bottom, to allow me to let the crud out. Later, I'll make a slow drip system for that, so the whole thing will be automatic.

The above and the below pictures explain best how it works. You can see in the above picture, you can see I've cut holes in the top of the pipe (above the bottleneck) for the insertion fittings to enter the PVC. (the inlet is slightly higher than the exit) Those gray fittings attach to the black hdpe pipe that has the rainwater flowing in it.

The rain pours in, filling the pipe, and raising the float to to the "bottleneck" get it? the plastic water bottle is a float that cuts off the flow to the pipe after the first 5 gallons or so , and then the rest of the water just flows over the top of the bottle, and on into the tank.

Here it is attached into the whole system. Hope all goes well!