Post by WVsnowflake on Jun 5, 2009 22:07:17 GMT -6
An Earth-Friendly Home
My idea of a homestead started with building a simple home out of native materials. I wanted an earth-friendly living structure, and my intuition said to build it round, like a Navajo hogan, so the energy could flow around it. I did not want any electricity or plumbing. I feel more at peace when not surrounded by electricity, and plumbing never made much sense to my way of thinking. I think outhouses are very practical because they don’t waste so much water.
I began the two-month project of creating a home by forming a circle of red cedar posts set upright in the ground. Next, I framed the roof by running logs wagon-wheel fashion from a center pole to the posts. I?set rough-sawn oak boards over these rafters. Then, on top of the boards, I put No. 30 felt paper and two layers of 6 mil black plastic. I cut blocks of sod — hunks of earth, with grass, intact roots and all — and put a 6-inch layer of sod over the plastic. Next came the real work of filling the area between the posts with blocks of sod. Because I’m on a hill and have a terrific view, I chose to have lots of windows, which cut down on the amount of sod I needed.
After laying the sod blocks, I applied three coats of cob — a clay and straw mixture — to the sod walls. Cob is wonderful stuff and can be molded into any shape imaginable, so I had a lot of fun being artistic. Now here I am in my home, which is about 200 square feet and looks like the hobbit houses that J.R.R. Tolkien wrote about in The Lord of the Rings. My house was built one handful at a time using basic hand tools, all for a cost of about $3 a square foot
Over the past four years, I’ve added several buildings to my homestead. The first was a root cellar. When I moved in, I planted a big garden, about 60 feet by 150 feet, so I needed a place to store food — nothing fancy, just a hole in the ground. As I dug the hole for my root cellar, I pried limestone rocks out of the ground and saved them for later use. This “quarry” gave me stone for the walls of the root cellar and provided a solid support for the sod roof. Thanks to the Mother Earth News articles about how and why to build a root cellar, I now have a better way to keep cabbages and other produce fresh year-round.
www.motherearthnews.com/Modern-Homesteading/2006-10-01/Grandpas-Hobbit-House.aspx
Images
www.motherearthnews.com/multimedia/image-gallery.aspx?id=74516&seq=0
My idea of a homestead started with building a simple home out of native materials. I wanted an earth-friendly living structure, and my intuition said to build it round, like a Navajo hogan, so the energy could flow around it. I did not want any electricity or plumbing. I feel more at peace when not surrounded by electricity, and plumbing never made much sense to my way of thinking. I think outhouses are very practical because they don’t waste so much water.
I began the two-month project of creating a home by forming a circle of red cedar posts set upright in the ground. Next, I framed the roof by running logs wagon-wheel fashion from a center pole to the posts. I?set rough-sawn oak boards over these rafters. Then, on top of the boards, I put No. 30 felt paper and two layers of 6 mil black plastic. I cut blocks of sod — hunks of earth, with grass, intact roots and all — and put a 6-inch layer of sod over the plastic. Next came the real work of filling the area between the posts with blocks of sod. Because I’m on a hill and have a terrific view, I chose to have lots of windows, which cut down on the amount of sod I needed.
After laying the sod blocks, I applied three coats of cob — a clay and straw mixture — to the sod walls. Cob is wonderful stuff and can be molded into any shape imaginable, so I had a lot of fun being artistic. Now here I am in my home, which is about 200 square feet and looks like the hobbit houses that J.R.R. Tolkien wrote about in The Lord of the Rings. My house was built one handful at a time using basic hand tools, all for a cost of about $3 a square foot
Over the past four years, I’ve added several buildings to my homestead. The first was a root cellar. When I moved in, I planted a big garden, about 60 feet by 150 feet, so I needed a place to store food — nothing fancy, just a hole in the ground. As I dug the hole for my root cellar, I pried limestone rocks out of the ground and saved them for later use. This “quarry” gave me stone for the walls of the root cellar and provided a solid support for the sod roof. Thanks to the Mother Earth News articles about how and why to build a root cellar, I now have a better way to keep cabbages and other produce fresh year-round.
www.motherearthnews.com/Modern-Homesteading/2006-10-01/Grandpas-Hobbit-House.aspx
Images
www.motherearthnews.com/multimedia/image-gallery.aspx?id=74516&seq=0
Are you making a Hobbit House for you and the family?