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 »
September 2, 2011 – 6:00 am
Ok I know I said we’d be in our tinyhouse by Spring. And we’re so achingly, so un-utterably, so plainly not in. Yet. But just when does spring start? Is it a date thing? An equinox thing? Can i find an adequate caveat?
You know those wattle-and-daub walls of ours? Great idea. No really. Only one problem. The daub don’t stick to them wattles. Initiate slight panic sequence until solution found. Which we did. Hooray for reed fencing, most unlikely of saviors. 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 »
