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 been all plain sailing, but now we’re up to the fun bit – rendering the wattles with the daub (i.e. the mud). So back came Frank Thomas, master strawbale builder, and we were off at a muddy trot. Read More »
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 non-toxic we’ve bent over backwards and done tonnes and tonnes of research into every conceivable element: insulation, wood products, glues, fixtures, cladding, pipes, water storage, roof gutters. You name it, we’ve sussed it. But now it’s getting to crunch time, our resolve is slipping… Read More »
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 recycled. Partly because we figured this was the cheapest way to build something. And partly because this was the best way to build a low-energy-footprint house, given our modest means. But there’s more to building recycled than meets the eye, we’ve found… Read More »
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 you: we will be into our tinyhouse by Spring. I’m going to do a weekly countdown post on the house from here on in. Starting at 5 weeks out. Read More »
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 walls this way (at least in the recent past), but multiple natural builders have assured us it should work. Hmm! Read More »
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. But we got there in the end, with a strong brew of the above.
Secondly, I would like to point out that sharing our challenges so nakedly on this blog is not something I really enjoy doing. Sometimes I would rather paint a rosy picture of first-generation farmers awash in successfully implemented permaculture solutions and photogenic fields of nitrogen-fixing perennials. But hey – where’s the fun in that? Read More »
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 energy spent on pumps. At all. Which makes for one resilient landscape.
So when it came to designing the rainwater harvesting for our drinking water at Milkwood Farm, we knew we wanted to store the water high. This way, if we didn’t have power for some reason, we would still have drinking water at our house, because we wouldn’t be relying on a pump to deliver the water to us. But we aren’t building our home on top of the hill – so how to get the water up there? Read More »
September 21, 2010 – 6:00 am
Recycled bridge beams: all de-bolted, squared up, and ready to build our house.
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 potentially poison its residents such a hard thing to do? Read More »
Following on from my brief explanation of the basic design for our lakeside tinyhouse (ok, damside – details, details), here’s how we’re approaching the inside bits. The house is split across two levels, hugging the two-step cut that forms our zone 1, cut into the hillside. Downstairs is kitchen and living space, and the bedroom / studio is up top.
The bottom level comprises a small but serviceable kitchen including a woodstove, and all the normal kitchen stuff like washup, benches, pantry and fridge. In addition to the upright fridge we’re creating a cool cupboard next to the sink on the right. A cool cupboard is a well sealed space which takes a passively-cooled inflow of air into its base and releases that air via convection out its top. On the way through, this constant stream of cool air passes through wire baskets full of foodstuffs that are best kept at a cool temperature and actively cools them. I’ll go into detail on this feature during its construction process soon. Read More »
December 11, 2009 – 10:00 am
If only building it was as easy as making this mock-up, we’d be done by now…
It’s happening, it’s happening! After what seems like a thousand stops and starts, most notably a) hiccups with the local council regarding various things (don’t even go there), b) the death of a certain piece of essential machinery (still yet to be resurrected – best not go there either), c) the birth of a certain small human, and not forgetting d) our unfortunate need to make a living, it appears that things are truly moving forward on our small dwelling at Milkwood…
The secret behind gaining momentum on this owner-builder adventure seems to be one which many in the same position might be familiar with after a similarly protracted start (has it really been nearly three years?) – and it is this: Get a Builder To Help You. They know stuff. Good stuff, too. Read More »
