Oh Deer.

For the second time, the deer have stomped my light fencing and chomped the heck out of the strawberries. You can see from this picture that I had stakes in the ground with deer fencing stretched across them (also keeps birds out, but not slugs) but the deer just went crazy and chewed on the fencing, stomped everything, and kicked stuff over. these were full grown strawberry plants.










here's a close up of what's left of one:

Each bit of wall

Every time we go down off the mountain, we plan our trips so that we get groceries, mail, and do whatever errands we need. Every time, that includes a load of broken concrete to go into the wall... unless it's bags of mortar, which are too heavy to include with a load of 'urbanite'.

here you can see what one smallish load looks like before I toss it onto the ground to be sorted and stacked onto the wall. Yep, these rocks get touched a minimum of three times. One to get them into the truck, one to get them out, and one to get them onto the wall. Each load is about 1000 to 1500 pounds.


You can also see used veggie oil containers that I picked up, ready to get filtered for fuel.

The wall continues...

I'm getting flack because I haven't posted in a week. well, besides being under-the-weather (not that stops much around here) there really isn't much to show. This wall building stuff is darn slow work. I took some pictures though. Here you can see the outside (what will eventually be waterproofed and buried) of the north wall. There's still a ways to go.










I took a minute in photoshop and drew in the area that the north wall (here seen from 'the front door') still has to cover. it's just chunks of old concrete and mortar mix until that pink section is filled in.







Here you can see a happy spot. This is the lower north wall, about where the bathroom sink will be, and the stone wall has come up as far as it needs to. We put in the tooth rocks to help connect the stone wall to the future 'cob', that is, adobe-like, wall. Seeing the 'teeth' means that wall is high enough.

Steps update:

Most (maybe all?) of the interior walls and steps are done. The mortaring part, I mean. it's a bit difficult to show perspectives, but here is the steps to the middle (2nd) bedroom. They'll have some nice piece of wood glued and bolted onto them, (I tossed some scrap lumber on there so you can get the idea) and then two all-wood steps built below these, where the milk crate is now. The plan is to have double/french doors on this bedroom.










In what will be the hallway between the 2nd bedroom and the bathroom area, there's going to be a storage spot, with doors on it... and then open shelves above it. I put the wine bottle there for perspective. This spot will have cob (mud walls) all around and above it, and so will be a pretty good constant-cool-tempature spot.








Here you can see the living room steps. I suppose you could say the camera is a bit to the left of what will be the kitchen island... looking up (east) to the living room and the front door. Again, the steps will have wood on them, with two wooden steps built in front. Further up, on the far side of the living room, there'll be one step, again with wood. (the wine bottle is on that step now) In this picture, you can see a post (holding up an unseen tarp) to the right of the wine bottle. One could imagine that post being right in front of the 'front' door.

You can also see from this picture that there's going to be a bunch more gravel put in for the floor, and then the earthen floor on top of that will hold the radiant heating tubes. You can see a milk jug in the living room area... the gravel will be deep enough to bury that milk jug.

Nice stuff around the yurt

Here's a nice scene: my second round of cheese with a bowl of arugala, earthen-oven-baked sourdough bread, and a small glass of wine.

Did I mention I'm all proud of the little pot lid handle I made when the store one fell off?

Cool Cool Cool

I've been frustrated by how our purified drinking water, that we put into bottles to have ready to drink, gets too warm sitting out on the counter in the yurt these hot days. (it was 100 in the yurt before lunch yesterday) and I've tried a few different things.

Our fridge is too small to have 4 or 5 liters of water in it, so I decided to tap into the cool underground. Not too far from the yurt,










I dug a hole and made a small lid for it, and filled it with drinks. They're not frosty, but they are nice and cool.

Hot Hot Hot!

Since it's been really hot these last days, I decided it'd be a perfect time to work on building really hot fires! Actually, I could argue that by cooking outside, I'm not heating up the yurt, so I'm really being thoughtful.

Anyway, here's me being excited about how hot my fire is burning inside my earthen oven.








and here's a direct shot. As you know, after about 3 hours of hot fire, I pull out the coals (no, I haven't yet used them to grill stuff with, but I will) and clean off the brick floor of the oven, and put the pizzas and breads right on the brick. Then I cook up granola, casseroles, etc.

A nice 'straight from the garden' scene.

We've had mild success with our garden this year... the soil isn't as good as I thought, we probably weren't watering enough, and it's already challenged for light, as we have the big trees blocking morning sun. Still we get some good stuff from it.
Tonight Melissa picked some small yellow beats, some swiss chard, and the handful of tomatoes that were ripe. Makes a nice picture... and a nice dinner.

Did I show you my 'patio' stairs?

These go down from the patio of the future house towards the yurt. (they go down to the west)

Update on Stairs and levels work:

We're now building mini-retaining walls for each level, which in some cases will have walls on them, and some spots will be stairs (probably with wooden tops for the 'tread' of the stair.)

Here you can see how we used some rebar to tie the bond beam into the stairs (not that it needed it)






Here you can see how well Melissa works at stacking the urbanite and filling in the mortar lines as we're working along. You can see the 3 bags of mason's mortar in the back of this photo... we've probably already used 60 of those, mostly on the retaining wall.

Concrete Review and Report:

As many 'green' builders know, concrete is actually a very toxic building material, with the horrible environmental impacts of it's creation at the top of the list. Add the big truck, and the lye/lime chemicals, the dust, and the fact that when people are done with it, they break it up and put it in a landfill... it's not that great. However, it is a very solid substance that is highly recommended for stability in earthquake zones, and to work against moisture issues. Thus, we had to use some. We got one trucks worth (yes, the whole nine yards, where the saying comes from) for the 'bond beam', the bottom rim of our little house. Of course, we're also using masons mortar for the retaining wall (mortaring together chunks of 'used' concrete, "urbanite") and we will mortar in another foot or so of urbanite on top of our bond beam.

Here you can see the bond beam after we took the forms off. We didn't have to worry about the smoothness of the top, as we need to mortar in the next row of urbanite, and a rough surface is better than a smooth one.
You can also see the overlap 'step' going from one level to the next in this photo. We wanted a couple of feet of overlap to help deal with the change in levels.





The one 'not perfect' situation of our concrete pour was there was more concrete in the truck than we needed. We had the pump guy go around and fill up our forms to the level we wanted, and we helped settle that in with plungers, etc. Then he said he had a batch more, and since it was paid for, we told him to add it to the top, to give us more height on the wall... Well, it was coming out of the truck drier than the rest, and we had a hard time keeping up with the pump working the harder mix. Thus, in a lot of places, we got this result:








It's not a big deal, as the entire bond beam will be covered with exterior plaster (along with the rest of the wall, or we may put some decorative stones on the front of the house, and the interior will have insulation and plaster over it... still, it would have been nice to feel that we had a perfect pour.


We got right back to business and started the little 'mini' retaining wall for the steps inside the house. This is the first 'course'. None of these will be seen inside the house either.






We're ready for the vampire wars after pulling out all the stakes that were holding up the forms. These are just some of the sharpened ones.