The Archie Bunker

On the topic of concrete...this concrete home is located on the property of design/builder Dave Sellers once of the Jersey Devils. The house is fully poured concrete; all molds were built one of a kind and on-site for pouring. No wolf could possible blow this house down.
What I love about this house is the constant discovery of details. Most homes are predictable, bland, and lack imagination. This house feels built on curiosity. The layout rambles through multilevels of concrete, industrial misfits, peaking windows, hidden doorways, experimentation of shape, overlapping levels, and juxtaposition of raw materials.
This hideaway bed slides out from underneath the kitchen and is ready to use. Obama likes it.





This house is also called the Archie Bunker because, even though it sits on a public golf course, Sellers designed the house to have its own small golf course. It has two holes to hit back and forth to.

Heavy Things

One of the classes I have been looking forward to taking has been last weekend's Concrete Countertops. Ever since I have seen Cemment Design's concrete candle holders, I have wanted to make something similar. A couple years ago I played around with making silicone molds and pouring quick cement in, however I wanted to learn the proper way of mixing and pouring of concrete.

The project for this class was to make a computer desk, shelf, and two coffee table tops for Hostel Tevere in Warren. Luckily for me, there was extra mold materials and concrete so I jumped on the chance to make my candle holder and a benchtop.
Here is Mike, one of our instructors from Stone Soup mixing the concrete. Only in Vermont would you add maple syrup to the cement mixture instead of water.





Here is the final computer table. The top surface is super smooth because of the PETG that we poured onto.
Here is my final benchtop. I am not sure what the actual bench will look like; I haven't gotten that far in my thinking.
Here is the heaviest concrete tealight holder ever.

Another Shed, Another Style

Last week was spent outdoors with a toolbelt on in a women-only carpentry class. We rocked through building a shed in a week and still had time for mojitos and to talk about Liz's job waxing male parts. The week, was fantastic. I now know that floor joints are spaced 16 on center, know that the jack stud is next to the king stud, and why nails are labeled in pennies. By the end I was also pretty confident with my chop saw and circular saw skills especially after my super straight plunge cut.
Here we visited the non-OSHA certified mill in downtown Waitsfield. Certainly could be a setting for a horror movie...we're still not sure how the place is still standing.





The women in the class were awesome! Sam, Jen, Emily and Emily, Kate, Liz and Liz, and Lisa. Thanks Lizabeth Moniz and Patti Garbeck, sassy instructors!

NBI Open House

On Friday we celebrated the completion of the Natural Building Intensive at Yestermorrow with an open house and graduation ceremony. It was great to see the home in another stage of the construction as well as hear about the process the students went through to get the house to where it was: site analysis, permaculture, timberframing, stone masonry, stick framing, straw bale, and natural plasters and finishes. While the house wasn't fully the completed, the students were able to fully complete different areas which actually gave the open house a feel for process of the construction.



Suddenly the Yestermorrow campus feels quiet. Congratulations to the students!

Cob Stomping

Sunday I took part in the Village-Building Convergence in partnership with the Barre VT community gardens and led by former YM intern, Nicholas Salmons. The project brought together the garden members, community members, additional volunteers and a few local natural builders to help build a round tool shed for the garden.


Cob is a natural building method that is a combination of clay, sand, and straw (this particular straw was leftover from the NBI site posted here). The mixture begins by combining the clay and sand until fully incorporated and the clay lumps are smoothed out. All the mixing is done by foot, in addition to a couple turnings of the clay (folding over the tarp). Once the mixture is uniform, then several handfuls of straw are added.

The sand, as Nick described, acts as the structural component to the wall, much like the way stone is structural. The clay acts as a binder and the straw gives the cob multidirectional filaments to hold the clay together. Cob building not only utilizes locally sourced materials, but also is forgiving, artistic, and is pretty intuitive.Here is Jess and Jan doing the cob dance:



The beer garden!

Toilet Paper Cutting

The Community Design/Build class at Yestermorrow just finished and installed their composting privy for Hubbard Park in Montpelier. Working under Jersey Devils founders, the class worked through a complete design and build process to create a universally accessible mouldering toilet.
With the theme, pressure and release (words of Steve Badanes), the user walks through a normal sized door to a space that widens toward the back. The class wanted the privy to have a traditional out-house appearance as the user walks to the structure, but have the view from the side be unique. The location of the privy sits on a sloping side that overlooks the forest. In order to take advantage of the view, the class designed a large screened opening so that the user will have a great view (and plenty of ventilation). It was fitting to have a toilet paper cutting, instead of the traditional ribbon cutting.




Is that Jersey Devil founder, Steve Badanes, on the toilet?

Shirt Detailing

Simple embellishments on old or plain t-shirts can go a long way. I had bought both these t-shirts for $5 at Marshall's and using some embroidery thread, material scraps and a button was able to make the shirts a lot more interesting.The fabric above was scraps of organic cotton that had a great heather grey tone on one side and a unbleached white on the other which I thought would make for a neat effect when rolled on a darker grey t-shirt. I hand-sewed using a blanket stitch and contrasting burgundy thread around the inside of the shirt collar. Final shirt:
This blue oversized t-shirt needed to be taken in on the sides and also gave extra fabric to do an overlap at the collar. I used a brown button I had extra and used it as a way to pin over the fabric. The shirt also had this odd gathering with an uninteresting stitch across the front chest area. I embellished that with a navy blue chain stitch to give the impression that the gathering was intentional, plus it matched the thread holding down the button.Final shirt: