Second weekend at Villa Sobrante. Sasha guided us through adding a window to her cob structure - so satisfying and beautiful! We had to trim bits off of the dry cob to fit the window in the space, and I could see why it is such a great structural material - it was incredibly hard and very difficult to trim. Ron, our trained furniture maker, guided us through cutting and sanding a piece of salvaged redwood. We ended up with an arch that will serve as an aesthetic detail and will hold the soon to come bamboo rafters. The idea is to make this into a living roof afterwards.
There was a great party in the evening with many alumni and friends from the Solar Living Institute. Homemade porter, guacamole and tasty BBQ!
Today, Massey showed us her design plans for an experimental building that will be composed mostly of clay and annually renewable fiber - ie, straw & bamboo mostly. Her inspiration came from a picture of an Iraqi teahouse constructed purely of bound reeds and molded into a dome shape. We spent a few hours doing some labor heavy recycling. Massey is taking lots of old stucco from the old house on site and pounding it with a heavy hammer until it breaks into small cement gravel pieces. This is going to be reused in the foundation. Lots of work, but very respectable that Massey had the imagination to use this material on site instead of taking it to the dump. We also began splitting bamboo and forming it into a kind of bond beam for the foundation. We'll be filling it with heavy clay straw and building it up with a straw waddle later on. To be continued . . .
