The next big adventure

Almost 3 years ago, we broke ground to make way for the tiny handmade strawbale house we currently call home. It was a momentous occasion for us, full of mixed feelings, and it was the beginning of a journey that basically consumed us for the following couple of years.

Building the tiny house was always a bit of a 'suck it and see' kind of exercise - to find out if we could really build our own house. Turns out we could! It was really hard at times, but it was always rewarding. And we so thoroughly enjoyed the experience of building, and have so thoroughly enjoyed living on our land, in our little handmade home, we're doing it again.

4 year old barefooted pirates are invaluable on the building site

In the last few months we've begun to slowly make moves towards building a second, slightly less tiny, slightly more luxuriously appointed (internal plumbing!!) handmade strawbale house. We don't have heaps of money, and we certainly don't want to go into debt, so things will be slow-going, as we plan to save a bit, build a bit, over the next few years.

Shadow of a shovelling lady

Building the tiny house has given us an excellent perspective on what we really want and need from a home, and what we can and can't manage to build by ourselves. We've discovered a few things we're going to do differently second time around (45 degree pitch roof? No thank you!), and a few things we're definitely going to do the same (strawbale? Most certainly!). If you're thinking of building your own home, it's something to seriously consider: I believe that building this place was the single best thing we've done in the last 5 years. The knowledge, skills and perspective it's given us - not to mention the savings in rent and bills! - have been absolutely invaluable, and we're very grateful to have had the opportunity.

So what are we planning to build next?

It's pretty basic: a strawbale rectangle with a skillion roof, containing 3 very small bedrooms, a fully strawbale-enclosed cool pantry (bigger than the bedrooms - food storage takes priority over sleeping space in this family!), a nice, open, functional kitchen, a beautiful warm eating area, and a lounge space with a wood fire that doubles as an oven and stove. 

Oscar and my dad laying the pipe that will carry our greywater directly to an absorption trench in our zone 1 garden

External walls will be rendered strawbale, internal walls will be framed using recycled wood pallets, clad with reclaimed corrugated iron and fence palings. Our experiences over the last few years of bathing outside have prompted us to forego an internal bathroom in preference of more kitchen space, with a primitive, outside greenhouse/shower-room combo to complement our existing firebath, which we love so much! We're also going to have another outside, composting toilet.

Footings full of water, which our dogs think of as purpose-built doggy-lap-pools, much to the detriment of the footings themselves

But for now, all we have is a kind of muddy area with some footings full of water, and pier-holes full of frogs, and occasionally children. 

Oh and a 110 000L tank that is collecting water off its own roof until we get it hooked up to the house. Not terribly appealing or inspiring, but it's a start, and our minds and hearts are busy and full, as we dream of this next big building adventure.

Now that's my idea of a party!

The common wisdom about owner building is that you shouldn't move in until the house is finished. If you do, it's likely that you'll never finish. Being determined, like I am, I thought we'd be immune to this. A year and a bit in, though, we still have quite a bit to do until our little house is completely 'done'. One of those things is the external rendering. After the mad rush of late-night and all-weekend rendering we did to get the inside finished so we could move in, we were pretty keen to have a break from the old render activity. It is, after all, quite hard, and not that fun.

So our outside render remained at various stages of one third to two thirds done - exactly as it was the day we moved in. It's been there, looming on various to-do lists, but always manages to be shafted by something more fun, like planting 800 landcare trees. Now that's what I call a good time!

We knew that getting the render finished was going to call for some drastic measures, and that drastic measure came in the form of a render, pizza and beer party for my birthday, thus combining a few of my favourite things: beer, pizza, friends and productivity. Need I say it? Ace balls.

Luckily, people seemed keen enough to participate, and we knocked over quite a bit of rendering. Thanks y'all!! Couldn't (perhaps wouldn't) have done it without you!

And as if helping render wasn't gift enough, I also got some completely ace presents, including an amazing handmade lampshade (impossible to photograph in all it's light-emitting glory…) Practical Self-Sufficiency, a glorious RedPeg bangle and some handmade pebble buttons, some music, and a peel for the pizza oven, lovingly handcrafted by Brett! Feelin' lucky, I tell you.

The pizza part of the party was the inaugural firing of our earth pizza oven. Ok... it was actually the second firing, the first being an abject failure on account of my paranoia about the oven collapsing. Basically, I built a teensy weensy fire that didn't even go near cooking our pizzas.

For the party, I stayed away from the oven, lest my apprehension once again result in a lukewarm oven, and Peps did a marvellous job of stoking the fire. Pearl rolled, topped and cooked around 25 pizzas for the hungry render hoards (amazing, right!?) and the oven stayed hot all the while, with the help of a little fire left burning round the edges. We even had banana, ricotta, honey and chocolate dessert pizzas. mmmmmmm....

The pizza oven was built using the instructions in the excellent book (it's all you need, really..) Build Your Own Earth Oven. Only difference is, ours is made from a deserted, dismantled (ie. completely trashed with a shovel) termite mound. You see, while humans struggle to get the correct ratio of sand to clay for infallible earth building, termites are expert at it. And as an added bonus, you get termite spit in your mix, which makes for very sticky, malleable, excellent building material. Genius.

The door was supplied by some lovely friends, and the door's frame was built by some other lovely friends. The whole shebang is one big lovely-friend fest!

Just like the party really, which was fun, and productive and pizza-and-beer-filled, and added another coupla layers of love to our little house, while all our merry kiddies ran wild and played in the sandpit and ate pizza and collected snails. Beautiful.

An anniversary

When we open iphoto, it defaults to the 'last 12 months' folder. I kinda like it, because every time I open the program, I get a little look at what we were up to exactly 12 months ago.

March 2012 - Moonie chops up our land to make way for home-building and driveway-making

March 2013 - home and driveway complete. Well.. almost...

Last time I opened it, I saw the pictures of our excavations and home-building. These photos - especially the ones from our workshop, especially the muddy ones - make me feel kinda funny inside. There's a big bit of pride at what we've achieved in only 12 months since breaking ground here, but there's also a bit of residual anxiety (it was stressful!!), lots of love (all those people helping us!!), relief (thank goodness we're not building load-bearing again!!) and joy that we're now living our dream, and that our relationship and family love has grown so much as a result of this adventure we're on.

April 2012 - mixing render by hand with my little 'helper'. I could barely keep my footing in that crazy mud...

March 2013 - Ahhh... gravel.

As I'm a results-driven kinda lady, I get immense pleasure from looking at what we've made here, and looking back on these photos is a big part of that feeling. When you're in it every day, it's hard to realise the progress you're making. These photos remind me that yeah - it's only been a year. We've achieved a lot. They help me to slow down a little and take it in (I can be impatient), and enjoy what we've built rather than rushing on to the next project. Anniversaries and birthdays are good like that - they're the most perfect opportunity to reflect on what you've got, where you've been, how you've grown, and where you'd like to go next.

April 2012 - final days of the strawbale building workshop, and the roof's finally going on, providing much-needed protection for our little house

March 2013 - and now she's got solar panels and a pergola and a garden!!!

When the earthworks started, 12 months ago, I felt so nervous to be disrupting the earth and all the things living on and in it. I felt nervous to be really, physically embarking on this building thing with, I realise now, very little knowledge. Sure, we had guts and determination to spare, but real, hands-on building knowledge was quite thin on the ground, though I felt, at that time, like we could do anything we wanted. And I suppose these photos show that you can, with love and determination and help from friends and family, and a willingness to ask questions of everyone, everywhere you go, and books, and helpful people who are happy to share knowledge, skills and experience. You can do it.

June 2012 - building detritus a-go-go and still plenty of mud

March 2013 - nasturtuims: the speedy gardening solution 

The objectives of building this little house were always to 'see if we can' (just like David Byrne wrote Psycho Killer just to "see if he could write a song"... I think that worked out OK for him), to provide somewhere to live while we saved up to build something else, so we wouldn't be enslaved by a mortgage for our whole lives, and to learn from our mistakes. 

And it has been an amazing learning experience. We've learned so much about building, about our land, about ourselves, about each other, about the resilience of kids, about the fun-ness of lofts and fire-baths, about the differences between wants and needs, about the seasons, about living on the land and working with it and learning from it, about happiness and tiredness, about plants and animals... the list goes on.

We feel really really lucky.

June 2012 - what the hell do we do with this???

March 2013 - steps, veggies, flowers, native shrubs, a barbecue, trampoline and cubby house - of course!

Bugs on a rug

I've always had a bit of a thing for lofts and attics. As a child (and teenager, and adult) I was a little besotted by the idea of a cozy roof-space bedroom, with a sloped ceiling, and maybe a dormer window or 2. I love Laura's descriptions of playing with Mary in the loft above their Little House, amongst the pumpkins and onions they have grown and stored up for the long (and quite probably hideous) winters out on the prairie.

When we moved into our own little house, we all immediately fell in love with our sleeping loft. It was cozy, it was warm, it had an amazing view down the valley, and it made us feel so safe. At the time, we could only source enough floorboards for the loft to go half-way down the length of the building. It was  therefore just a sleeping loft, with no room for anything other than a big bed and a couple of boxes for keeping books in and on. We were always open to the possibility of extending, but we had to find the timber. We knew this would be tricky, so we were willing to wait. Thanks to my friend and fellow recycled-hardwood-enthusiast David, however, the wait wasn't really that long. I'm not normally a jealous person, but when I visited David's stockpile of recycled hardwood of all shapes, sizes and dimensions, I went a little green, for sure. But he's a totally ace sharer, so we were in luck. His stockpile included a bunch of floorboards that, miraculously, matched the dimensions of the floorboards we already had and so the loft was extended, just in time to accommodate some of the kids' Christmas presents.

The kids' end

Decorating and arranging the loft has pretty much been a dream come true for me. It's basically doubled the floor-space of our house, though adults can't stand up there, so it's decidedly kid-friendly space, which I think makes it all the more wonderful for our little people and their friends.

Thing was, the floor was kind of hard, and, owing to my less-than-precise carpentry skills, there were some decent cracks between some of the boards, so we'd occasionally get a piece of lego falling through.

Enter the mattress felt rug.

A couple of months ago when we were working on our spring and summer planting, the kids and I stripped an old double mattress so we could use the springs as a trellis for growing beans. 

If you've never seen one before, you wouldn't know how beautiful the inside of a mattress could be, all rusted and spiraling and covered in twining bean plants covered in gorgeous scarlet flowers. 

Mattress innards hard at work supporting scarlet runner beans (with only a little bit of frizzle, courtesy of last week's blow-dryer weather)

Better yet, they're free and make use of something that would otherwise be a massive waste issue. The stripping itself is not the easiest job in the world, but it's kind of strangely rewarding. Run a stanley knife around the outside edge and peel back the layers to reveal your beautiful, sculptural spring trellis.

beans, pumpkins, sunflowers, and tomatoes get cozy

If you're lucky, and you have a super-old mattress, you'll find horse-hair or coconut fibre, which can be composted or used as mulch in your garden. And if you have a medium-aged mattress like ours (maybe 20-25 years old) you'll find some felt that you can use to make an excellent floor rug.

As you probably know, rugs are a. expensive and b. usually made by poor people who don't really get paid a fair amount for the time and effort they put into the rug-making. For these reasons, making rugs is a pretty attractive idea, except that they take a bloody long time. Mattress-felt rug, on the other hand, took me about 3 hours, including the time it took me to strip it from the mattress. The rest of the time was spent making a border from scraps of fabric (the more colourful the better!) and sewing it around the edge, trying to coax my sewing machine into not freaking out about the thickness of the thing.

I arranged it as the kids slept last night, and when Olive woke up this morning, the first thing she said was "where did that carpet come from?" then, "can I go and feel it?". It feels beautiful and, even better than feeling and looking cool, I'm pretty sure it's double-recycled: the felt itself seems to be made from fabric scraps, which means it's got these gorgeous speckles of different colours, including something that looks a lot like yellow lurex.

Loving the first of this year's blackberries, discovered and picked on my ride home from work, hand-delivered directly to the loft

If you can use a stanley knife and sew a straight line, then you can have a freakin' gorgeous bean trellis that doubles as garden feature and windbreak PLUS a floor rug that's free and non-exploitative. How often does something like that happen in your life?

one month in

It's been a little more than a month now since we moved into our little strawbale home, so we thought it was time for a little reflection on the things that we've learned and are still learning about home building and living on the land.

Probably the most surprising thing has been just how liveable (dare we say 'spacious'?) the place actually is. It's just on 24 square metres. Just so you know, the size of the average house being built in Sydney these days is around 300-400 square metres. So it's small. It's one room, with a loft. But it has everything we need, and still room for toys and books and fun stuff like that. And we haven't even built our undercover outdoor kitchen-y bit yet. We're feeling really good about keeping things small, though Pearl is missing having a kitchen (new birthday books like The Gourmet Farmer Deli Book aren't really helping on this front). Yes it's true, Pearl can feel her fingers aching for some baking action or some handmade cheese action but none of this is possible with our current bare bones infrastructure. However, on the up, we will be building a wood-fired cob oven sometime soon and so we anticipate some great baking days ahead. Also the delay on having a home with a proper kitchen is a good thing in terms of having the time and space to really think through what our kitchen should entail - mega-pantry and cold store anyone? Special room for hanging handmade smallgoods? Oh yeah....

Annie is still not totally over the floor debacle, and it seems that our 'flagstones' are still shrinking, so the puttying/grouting/filling task remains ongoing. The rug (complete with springy, freecycled underlay!) in the 'loungeroom' helps things, and Annie is slowly working on a braided and coiled rag rug, so it's not all bad. In fact, Annie is pretty sure that if the whole thing hadn't been such a bitter disappointment, she probably wouldn't even notice it. She just doesn't cope well with failure. But it's OK! It's been a learning experience, and we've definitely made note of the things we'll do differently next time (yes, we will be making another earth floor when we build again) like not using any bagged clay and making a more sturdily rammed substrate using something like road base. We'll probably also do a cob floor, rather than rammed.

We're all completely in love with our sleeping loft. We probably always thought it'd be a nice cosy place, but it's far surpassed expectations. It is beautiful. The sunrise/sunsets are beautiful, the Bermagui-oiled ancient floorboards are beautiful, the fence-palings are beautiful and the view is freaking amazing. And yeah - it's comfy and cosy as well. We actually don't know that I'll be rushing into having a bedroom any time soon, so enamoured with the loft are we.

We're really pleased with how the lime-washing has stabilised the clay walls. When it was just clay it was a little dusty, but the lime-wash seems to have bound it all together. It's also just so beautiful and light.  We love the bale walls, perhaps more than we thought, and can safely say that we are absolute card-carrying strawbale devotees and would not even consider any other type of building. Not that we're absolutist or anything... 

No but seriously, this little straw bale is just so comfy temperature wise. When we were building, and people asked us what kind of heating we'd have, our answer of "We're not having heating - it's a passive-solar-designed strawbale house - we won't need it" was inevitably met with chuckles (read:"damn hippies don't know what they're talking about"), wry, knowing smiles, or comments like "Ah... you've never lived through a Bega winter, have you...". 

So relentless were such responses that we actually started doubting our little building before it was even finished, and started looking around for a little wood stove or some such. But, even though we moved in here in Wintertime when the night time temperatures get down below zero and we wake up and see frost all around, in our little strawbs with the old (ie. non-double glazed) curtainless windows, we have been quite snug without a fire or any form of heating. Is that not amazing?

The land itself continues to delight us, and has shown us some quite lovely little surprises in the form of stunningly rich black soil with crazy-good water-holding capacity and a spring-fed dam, which is a major asset. We are, of course, still discovering it all, and expect more surprise and excitement as the days go by..... Seeing how happy our kids are here on our land has been so heartwarming. It's like the physical space has allowed their imaginations to soar and they spend so many hours immersed in amazing play scenarios together and alone. We're seeing new sides to both of them as they embark on new adventures and journeys and discover their new world.

We still have so much to do. The coming weeks' to do list looks something like this: finish the outside lime render, instal more fence paling sealing inside, build a covered pergola over our dining room, paint, instal solar system, finish kid's cubby, slash grass, get ducks, build fences, get chickens, mulch kids play area, prepare the ground for the 850 trees we are planting as part of a windbreak/wildlife corridor, continue to plant out our first veg and herb garden, start to plan our first food forest garden, plant citrus, olives, pomegranates, almonds and avocadoes,  make some decisions re livestock... Oh and on it goes.... But now we're here, actually here on our land it all feels very possible and really pretty fun.

On move-in eve

It seems unreal. The last week's flurry of night-time, last-minute painting-and-finishing by torchlight is finally over and we're sitting here for the last night in Vickie's lovely warm house drinking wine and thinking "wow: Tomorrow we're in". Sure, tomorrow will be a 'soft' move-in. Mostly just our bed into the freshly-painted loft, a chest of drawers to store our basic essentials and, if we get to it, maybe a couch. There is still a bit to do - painting and finishing-off, mostly, and a whole lot of tidying up and arranging.

Freshly Porter's-painted recycled corrugated iron, hardwood fence-palings and beautifully oiled wide boards.

Last night, I sealed the floor with our Bermagui oil - a combination of beeswax, citrus-based solvent and linseed oil. It's the same oil we used on our upstairs loft floorboards, and while they turned out quite beautifully, our debacle of an earth floor still leaves a lot to be desired. Yes, it cracked. Quite a lot. At first, we filled the cracks with cement, but then the cement cracked. We spent a heartbreaking few days trying to reconcile ourselves with ripping the whole thing up and concreting it. This was quite devastating for us, and more than a few tears were shed as we faced this reality. The compromise was about much more than the question of the embodied energy of concrete. It was about the work that had been put into that floor by so many people. It was about our vision of what a beautiful earthen floor could be. It was about using natural, mother-earth-made materials from our very own neck of the woods. It was about softness underfoot. It was about saving money. And it was about pride. More than a few people had told us we'd be better off with concrete, so digging up our earth floor and replacing it, before we'd even moved in was going to involve a big bit of word-eating.

But after some sage counsel from our beloved hostess Vickie, a few words from Leonard Cohen courtesy of beautiful Nessie, we realised that the floor is functional, and it is there, and, while it is significantly less beautiful than we first envisaged, we've decided to rug it up and live with it. 

Thank goodness for the recent rug-making workshop!

The cracks have now been sturdily filled with a mixture of bondcrete and river sand. Some of the cracks were pretty hefty, so they got a pre-fill with swept-in sand, then bondcrete was poured in on top, then the whole lot was dusted with sand. There are still a few gaps (the worst cracks were more than an inch wide and probably 3 inches deep - right down to the gravel substrate) but it's good enough to work with.

Yep, it's hideous. But it feels nice under foot and it'll store heat when the sun hits it so it's gonna stay.

On this building journey, I have learned that when you are a home builder who doesn't really know what you're doing, products like bondcrete, liquid nails, expanding foam and caulked-in gap fillers are, while decidedly unnatural, pretty much your best friends. I'm cool with that. The bondcrete has worked wonders as a floor-crack filler, and it's allowed us to make a pretty buggered-up floor into a functional floor and, while it's still a little painful for us to look at now, we know that in a few months' time when it's covered in hand-made rugs and furniture and toys and books, and our spring garden is flourishing and our little cottage is filled with all our beautiful pictures and treasures, we're probably not going to be thinking too much about it.

Old-school brand-stamping. We just couldn't paint over it.

Ring the bells that still can ring

Forget your perfect offering

There's a crack in every thing

That is how the light gets in.

PLaying cubbies in the loft: Part 1

As we move closer to moving into our house I feel simultaneously overwhelmed, excited, anxious and impatient. The list of things we need to finish before we can move in grows shorter every day, yet some of those tasks that are looming ahead of us seem enormous. Take the eaves, for example. That's the little gap between the top of the wall and the bottom of the roof. I never thought about that little gap, never considered how we'd close it up, what we'd use, how it would be done. But now that Brett and I have started lining the ceiling, I'm noticing that it is quite a gap, and something will need to be done about it. But that task we will come to when the ceiling is lined. Hey - it might even get done after we move in. For now we have more pressing - and BIG - issues, namely the floor and the ceiling.

Day 3 after we made our floor, some cracks started to appear. This was not at all what we'd hoped, but it seems that even not-very-wet clay shrinks quite a bit when it dries. The cracks are everywhere. They're quite deep (around 2 inches) and about 1cm wide at the widest part. Not insubstantial, and definitely something that will need to be rectified. Some earth-floor literature suggests using a different-coloured clay slurry in cracks, giving the floor a kind of flagstone look. We're not massive fans of this look, and were really hoping to avoid it. But the thing we realised is that we, in this home-building exercise, have chosen to employ a little lady who has some of her own ideas. That little lady is Mother Earth. Unlike something like concrete, which is man-made and therefore predictable, ye olde clay is Mother-Earth made and therefore profoundly unpredictable. Take our workshop week. April was carefully chosen on account of it being (statistically speaking) one of the driest months in the Bega Valley. But do you think Mother Nature gives a rats arse about statistics? No way Jose. And to prove it, she flogged down on our uncovered bales, just to keep us on our toes. Did we learn? No way Jose! We thought we knew what to expect with this freshly-dug-from-the-earth clay we made our floor from, but we were wrong. Good thing we have a sense of humour.

In this photo you can see the double layer batts - thin eh? -a couple of the floor cracks and a space person. Leftover bits of hardwood were used to make sure the floor wasn't damaged by the ladder, though it's definitely hard enough to walk on without leaving marks.

Just to be a little different and try out something new for a change, we have decided to fill our cracks with wax. Reasons? I believe it will be easier to fill them up most thoroughly with something liquid, it dries pretty hard and fast, and it might look a little less like flag-stones than if we use clay. But that is a task we will complete after the ceiling is finished. 

Yesterday Brett and I started insulating and cladding the inside of our lofty roof-space. Let's just say it was not the funnest job in the world, and leave it at that (though Brett did say he felt like we were "playing cubbies"up in the loft with a view of the tree-tops, eating chocolate in what looked for all intents and purposes to be some kind of elaborate dress-ups).

Space person in the cubby/space ship nailing up the super-shiny mini-orb

Choosing insulation was a major, confusing, exhausting and ultimately inconclusive pain in the arse. So much information, so many salespeople, so much well-intentioned advice. While insulation should always be a big issue, not to be taken lightly, in a strawbale house it's even more so. The walls, you see, are rated to be something like R20. Your average housing batts are something like R3, if you're lucky. I read once that if you build a strawbale house and don't insulate the roof properly, it's basically like building a really expensive chimney. 

The problem for us with our little strawbs is that the roof space, where we're s'posed to cram tons of excellent insulation, is where we're going to be sleeping. In total, we had about 12cm to fill with insulation. We needed bang for our buck, and bang for the minimal space. What we settled on is a special kind of compressed bulk insulation that is 85% recycled glass, which is spun into fibres and bonded with a glue that is, well, not exactly natural. It's normally used in industrial applications, and we had to order it direct from the manufacturer as it isn't available through any retailers. It wasn't cheap ($2000 for the whole roof), but this was one area we weren't prepared to skimp on. We wanted high performance and high recycled content, while still keeping within the constraints dictated by our tiny roof space. These batts are 5cm thick, so we doubled them, bringing the total to 10cm and, combined with the anticon blanket that is attached under our corrugated iron, we have an R rating of 3.9. Pretty good given the circumstances. In other situations, with other rooflines, Frank uses whole strawbales as roof insulation, creating what he calls an 'esky'. I love this, in theory, and was keen to give it a go, but the roof needs to specially engineered for an application like this, and when we priced trusses for this roof they came in around 3 times the amount we paid, and we wouldn't have had a loft space.

We're lining the ceiling with some mini-orb (mini profile corrugated iron) that I got at Eden tip for about $15 (the savings offset the price of the insulation). Score! But boy oh boy does it need to be painted. That stuff is shiny: at the moment it feels a little less like a cozy lofty treehouse and a little more like a crazy space-pod. Especially in my fibreglass-proof safety suit, goggles, and breathing apparatus.

Mud and blood*

* This blog post has pictures of blood-related activities. If you're likely to be grossed out, maybe get a friend to read it to you so you don't have to see the photos.

Last friday Pearl and I spent the day together, just the 2 of us, for the first time in what seems like a very long time. We chatted, ate take-away hamburgers sitting on strawbales in the sun, and finished the third and final coat of render in the little house we're building. 

Like Pearl said, it was 'kinda like a date', but instead of going to see a movie or a band, we were building a house for our family. Pretty nice.

Pearl on our 'date' adding final beautifulness to our clay walls

The third coat was on a deadline as it had to be done before we started on our earth floor, which was slated for a sunday working bee. And boy were we busy little bees!

Just like convicts, but with head-scarves and rainbow legwarmers

I don't remember exactly when I decided that I was really keen on having an earth floor, but I do remember when I decided I wanted to use blood in it. I was reading The Straw Bale House. Unlike many books about natural building, this book actual has a half-decent discussion of earthen floor techniques, though it is sadly lacking in technical instruction. Still, from reading it I learned that in many traditional Native American  societies, earth-floor-making was women's work, and blood - usually ox blood - makes an earthen floor REALLY hard. 

Sold.

Most things you read, and most people you talk to about earth floors will talk about a poured earth floor - mix up a slurry of clay and/or cement and/or soil and/or sand and/or manure and pour it in wet, the same way you would concrete. Then wait about a million years for it to dry out, in the mean time trying not to worry about the enormous cracks that may or may not form in the shrinking floor material. This always seemed a little stressful to me. Furthermore, a friend who'd house-sat a house with a poured earth floor had commented that it was "like living in a quarry". Ummm… not really the look/feel we're after with our little bothy. Not to mention the fact that we really need to move into our little house as soon as we can - 6 weeks + drying time just isn't an option.

I knew there had to be something better, but finding information about earth floors - poured or otherwise - is pretty bloody tricky.

But then I came across this blog, which inspired me to start adding 'rammed earth floors' to my search parameters. I still came up with bugger all, but I learned enough to cobble together a method, used both in Japan and Europe, involving a pounded or rammed earth floor which is soaked in blood and then sometimes sealed with oil or wax. I discussed this method with Frank and, with his seal of approval, decided to go ahead and make it happen.

Brett rakes in the first 20 wheelbarrow-loads of clay. Our 24 square metre floor took 40 wheelbarrows and a few buckets of clay

Enter the working bee! Friends from near and far (including new blog-met friends Holly and Chris, who have, amazingly, played a gig in a Scottish bothy in their pyjamas) once again rocked up to lend a hand barrowing and bucketing and raking and stomping and sledge-hammering and whacker-packering and blood-painting our clay floor.

Annie and Chris adding to and stomping down the first layer

The blood was obtained from our friendly local organic meat providore, who supplied us with a 20L bucket of steer blood for $20. Pretty reasonable, I thought. Problem was, by the time we came to actually use the blood it was… well… kind of congealed. The problem with congealed blood is that the bits that do the congealing - the platelets - are actually the bits you want in your floor, making it hard. Luckily for us, we had my dad's paint mixer drill attachment handy, so we whipped up a bit of a blood smoothie, and were on our way.

Mmmm... blood smoothie

Yep, it was kind of gross. Yep, it smelled kind of yuk. Yep, it was surreal, and horror-movie-like, and funny, all at the same time.

Yes folks - it's blood. In a kiddie bucket

I suspect that the clay, which we had whacker-packered to within a fraction of a millimetre of its life, was actually a little too wet, and so didn't soak up as much blood as I would have liked. The moisture content of the clay was somewhat mediated by the dry clay (left over from rendering) we had to sprinkle on to stop the whacker-packer from sticking to and lifting up the floor, but the texture, when we all excitedly removed our shoes and walked all over it, was still a little bit like firm plasticine. 

Chris and Holly filling in the low bits, while the whacker-packer has a bit of a lie down. The edges and corners were done by hand, using a sledgehammer and a bit of hardwood left over from the top plate

Our heels sunk in a bit if we weren't careful, but it really was a beautiful feeling, and I love the gentle undulations in the floor. Let's face it - a dead-level floor in our wonky little house would look pretty weird, but we were all pretty impressed with our eyeballing when we set the straight-edge on it and saw that it was actually reasonably level.

The finished floor, just as the whacker-packer ran out of petrol

The blood was applied with a broom and a strange, foam-covered trowel my dad had given us (maybe used for tiling?). We applied it in 2 coats, (the second by torch-light) to let each soak in as much as possible.

Holly ain't scared of no blood broom

Now, we wait. When Pearl deems it dry enough (I am notoriously impatient) we will seal it with a blend of linseed oil, citrus solvent and beeswax, and then we'll be done!

In the spirit of our entire building journey thus far, our floor-making was a massive learning curve for all of us, involving much head scratching, collaborative problem solving and exclamations of "I think I read somewhere...". When I checked on the floor this morning it was looking pretty good (albeit a little gruesome on account of some still-not-dried blood bits) with no sign of cracking or disintegration or, as Brett had predicted, foxes with their tongues stuck to the floor. Time will tell how the whole thing wears. We're going to glue old carpet to the bottom of all our furniture, and implement a 'no shoes' rule. I'm also making an enormous plaited rag rug, just in case, but I feel safe knowing that we've essentially done what millions of people have been doing for thousands of years (OK - minus the whacker-packer) and made their home from the earth around them.

In addition to the $20 for the blood, we spent about $150 on gravel for the sub-floor drainage layer.

Thrills and gratitude and coat number 3!

Trees through window courtesy of Olive

Yesterday was a day of some significance for us as we began the final coat of internal render. As with all our coats of render, we're going with Frank's recipes. Recipe for the third internal clay layer is 3 parts of washed sand, 1 part clay, mix with water to thick gravy consistency. And wowee how easily layer number 3 goes on!

We felt a little bit of trepidation approaching this third and final coat. With the previous two coats it felt like there was some scope to be a bit rough and ready, as we knew there was always going to be another layer to cover our sins. But now, with layer number three, this is it. There is nowhere to hide. Luckily the render glides on like icing. I think I may have used the icing analogy before. But let it be known that layer three is even more like icing than layer two. Oh sweet relief. We powered along and got half the inside rendered in just one afternoon.

Annie had been inspired to try a little bit of burnishing, uber-inspired as she has been by reading the Cob Builders Handbook. In it, Becky Bee suggests rubbing a large flat, smooth stone across the semi-dry final layer in order to smooth it out and assist the clay molecules to align, making it more durable.

We're rather lacking the large, flat, smooth stones on our block, being more of the prehistoric granite outcrop that it is. And so, on Annie's mum's excellent suggestion, we used the discarded elbow of some recycled pipe. It worked a treat. Having said that, we're not so fussed about having super-smooth walls preferring a more handmade quality to our little, tiny house.

We're aiming to finish this final layer on Friday when we have the hours between 9 and 3 sans children. Oh but we have little choice but to finish it the inside walls this week as we're planning on making our floor this Sunday and we don't know how long it'll take to dry. We figure we can catch up on some outside business while our beautiful rammed earth floor is curing. We're pretty excited about our rammed earth floor working bee this Sunday. We've got a big pile of clay soil, we've almost got the blood and our special natural sealant aka. Bermagui blend is on its way to us. But more on this at a later time. 

Sunday also provided a little bit of a thrill when we discovered nine little bubba eucalypts rising of-their-own-accord from our degraded ex-dairy farming land. It's such a wonderful thing to observe these moments of natural bush regeneration and so we resolved to help it along and start a little regen project in and amongst these little trees, which surround a colossus of a eucalypt. It's a little spot perfect for Winter's day picnics with sun shining down from the north and views down the valley. 

Olive declared it the perfect place for a fairy party

And it also provides a new perspective on our little tiny strawbale

We were also very grateful for Annie's mum (Carolyn aka. Nanny) and her superb window cleaning efforts. It's a job we've been wanting to tackle but never quite found the time. Another little thrill was had, as we saw, just how beautiful our windows might be when not covered in possum piss, dirt and lime render. Thank you Nanny/Carolyn/Mummy! Truth be told we could have avoided the mess by keeping windows covered but so excited, were we, to have them in providing our house with so much more of its house-ness that we just didn't think about the mess we were getting them into

Thanks Nanny!

 The day ended in a rendering frenzy in fading light as I rushed to finish the final barrow load before the light entirely disappeared and before the kids, through tiredness and hunger, lost it completely. Luckily our neighbour across the hill provided some intrigue in the form of "burning off". Yes I know, who burns off these days? Hmm well plenty of farming types around Bega it seems. Oscar watched from our most coveted spot, the front step. This front step is going to see some action, so warm and sunny it is on these cold cold days.

Oscar on front step by Olive