Welcome to The Year of Mud! Be sure to check out our latest offering of 2013 Natural Building Workshops, including Timber Framing and How to Build a Cob Oven. Thanks for reading!
The infamous (and absolutely gorgeous) H.O. Studley Tool Chest
By the way, comments should be back open! I swear, I am just constantly plagued by weird comments bugs on this blog, and half the time people can’t chime in because something in the inner workings of this here website has rewired itself again. Go ahead and try it now, though!
Moving on… In just a couple of short weekends, Handworks in Amana, Iowa is happening. Handworks (May 24-25) is a sweet little two day woodworking hand tool festival, with a bunch of companies turning out to show off their stuff, providing a good excuse for woodworkers and tool mongers to talk even more about sharp edged things.
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I think I have it figured out. I’ve boiled life down to the most elemental action. As I see it now, life is basically an on-going series of moving objects around.
When you build a cob house, you move sand and clay and straw onto a tarp, or into a pit, and continue to move it around with your feet so that it’s mixed. Then you pick it up and move it onto the foundation (which may be a series of stones that you picked up and arranged on top of a drainage trench filled with gravel that you moved into place), and eventually, you get to a place where you might move wood around to form the shape of a roof. Of course the wood will need some work done to it, perhaps some joinery, which means you’ll be moving chunks of material out of the wood itself.
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Roundwood timber framing implements whole trees, eliminating the waste from milling larger trees into dimensional timbers, and offers a host of other benefits in the realm of timber frame construction.
Our Timber Frame Workshop this year will focus rather heavily on roundwood joinery and techniques, which I do believe is rather unique to this class. If you’re curious about implementing whole trees in natural building, you’ll have your chance this summer.
And be sure to check out my guest post for Tiny House Design here — 3 Benefits of Roundwood Timber Framing.
Image source: Ben Law’s Woodland Home
Plastering your straw bale house — a critical step to get right!
Plastering straw bale walls is time-consuming, it requires finesse, and it’s definitely something you want to avoid having to do over again, at all costs. Plaster is a barrier to the elements, to moisture, and it’s what will define the aesthetic appearance of your home. I recently appreciated Andrew Morrison’s succinct plastering tips article at Strawbale.com.
If you want a better handle on how to do a successful plaster job on your house, read this! It’s the most technical and critical part of straw bale construction.
Handmade toll roll for less than $5!
Protect your tools. Both you and they will be much happier with adequate shelter and storage. Even with our new tool shed, there is still a feeling of inadequacy for the storage of some of our building tools. Better shelves might help, but we’ve got planes, chisels, and all manner of things that are a bit too “exposed” and unprotected for my liking.
However, we are on the way to changing some of that, now that April made her first leather tool roll for our timber framing chisels. I’m in love with it!
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