So about 5 months ago we got interviewed about the process of building a very small house… and last weekend the resulting article finally made it to the paper. Apparently we’re part of a ‘backlash’… I just thought we were trying (trying as opposed to necessarily succeeding) to build something simple and within our means… [...]
January 23, 2012 – 6:00 am
So just over a year ago, our house dam filled for the first time. And then went into scary nearly-melt-down. So we pumped the water out, fixed it, and then waited for it to fill again. And waited. For a year. Do excuse multiple soggy shots of muddy pools, but this is big news at [...]
October 4, 2011 – 6:00 am
Mud is the most amazing building material. It’s beautiful, it’s local, it’s completely non-toxic, and it’s free! And perhaps the best bit is that your house takes on the colors of the hills around you, as you wrap your home in the clay of that particular place. As outlined previously, our experimental wattle-and-daub walls haven’t [...]
August 20, 2011 – 6:00 am
All the way through this epic project to build a very small house, we have had a couple of rules about materials: lowest possible footprint, recycled where possible, and the trickiest: non toxic. Like so non toxic, you could feed it to your toddler. And they wouldn’t expire as a result. To keep our house [...]
August 10, 2011 – 6:00 am
In the course of scrounging, dumpster diving, and exploring junkyards for our building materials, we came across a pair of crazy-beautiful 1930′s french doors for five bucks. Sold! What we didn’t realize at the time was just how expensive cheap doors can be. Nearly all the materials that have gone into building our tinyhouse are [...]
There’s nothing like a good old deadline to fire things up and move a building project along. A hard deadline, that is. Our first deadline, the birth of our child, didn’t seem to work as impetus. But this time, we mean it. And we’re going to make it. And so i make my pledge to [...]
This tinyhouse building thing is taking ages. But we’re getting there now! For the walls, we’re planning on experimenting with double-skin wattle-and-daub with insulation in between. We started off planning for strawbale walls, but we’ve now decided to try wattle and daub to maximise the inside space. We don’t know of any precedents of doing [...]
First off, i would like to make an important point: we are yet to meet a challenge at Milkwood Farm that we could not fix with careful thought, good advice, relentless research, a strong dose of creativity and a stronger dose of humor. That said, the saga of the middle dam nearly had us stumped. [...]
February 28, 2011 – 6:00 am
One of the most powerful concepts in permaculture for me is ‘keep the water high’. All water stored high in the landscape is potential energy, thanks in part to gravity. If your water is high, you can make that water available to everything below it in the landscape, via gravity feed and piping, with no [...]
September 21, 2010 – 6:00 am
[caption id="attachment_1121" align="aligncenter" width="500" caption="Recycled bridge beams: all de-bolted, squared up, and ready to build our house."]
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Natural building is a conundrum. In every sense of the word. Pick an aspect of modern western building, and then try and find an economically priced, ethically viable and completely non-toxic solution with a minimum of embodied energy. I am telling you now, dear reader, that for many materials you will be looking for quite some time.
Off-gassing plastics, sealants, wood products impregnated with (organic) poison to prevent critters eating it, pipes that leach, insulation with massive embodied energy or just a prohibitive price tag. It seems frequently that while building our tinyhouse we keep running into these problems. Why is the simple act of building a small and simple home which is ethically sourced, economically priced and which won’t poison its residents such a hard thing to do?
