A wander through an unbuilt house part 2

The bathroom is on the southern wall, so has a hybrid cob/strawbale wall - did I mention that before?  can't remember but I have now lol.  On this southern wall next to the bathroom is a door that leads to the coolstore.  Thick walls, a double door entry (one door, short hallway, second door) and on the other side of the second door, pantry heaven.  This room will hopefully mean that I don't need to have a fridge, it should stay cool enough to store fruits, vegetables and other foodstuffs that need to be kept cool.  I will also have a freezer in here to store meat and frozen vegies.  Lots of shelves to store food and bins under the shelves for bulk goods like beans, flour and rice. 
Next to this door the first kitchen bench starts.  The house curves around at this point so the kitchen window takes in views down the valley to the south and over the hills to the west (or more likely over the trees and gully).  There is my wood stove on the western wall and the bench goes all the way from the storeroom door to the stove.  There are shelves under the bench with a curtain covering them.  The sink is under a window looking down the valley - the dream would be an old fashioned farm house style sink but we'll see what pops up at the time.  There will also be shelves in the wall, probably between the sink and the stove, to store the plates, cups and saucers etc.

Next to the stove, a table and chairs for eating, under a window that looks to the west.  The northern wall has the greenhouse on it, soaking up the sun and warming the house.  Where the wall from the kitchen meets this area it drops to be half height.  This forms the back of the cob couch that runs along this wall to the doorway.  The greenhouse is behind this half wall which provides thermal mass to soak up the warmth from the sun.  The top half of the wall is a window to allow the sunlight to come in and light the house and warm the floor.  There is a vine growing over the greenhouse which shades it in summer so the house doesn't get too hot and when it loses its leaves in winter lets in the sun to warm the house. Plants in there will provide us with food and greenery hopefully all year around and I'd love to have a second bath in there to enjoy an almost outside bathing experience.  The cob bench on the inside of the house is basically a shell that has a wooden top that opens to provide extra storage space.  In front of it sits a coffee table made of black heart sassafrass. 

Furniture is minimal in my house, this is on purpose - I don't need much. 

So that is a wander through my house - the dimensions probably don't make sense and it will probably change as time goes on and I get closer to actually building, but so far I think it works.  Works as a thought experiment anyway ;)

Drainage

A couple of things have had me pondering drainage lately.  When I dug the grave for Rob Anybody I was happy to  notice that the soil around here is full of clay - great for building with cob!  The other thing is that it has rained a lot here lately.  First it snowed, now it is raining.  Road closing amounts of rain.  The Huon River is swollen and running fast.  The combination of clay soil and huge amounts of water is basically sodden, puddly, water-not-going away ness.  For a cob house this is not good!

There are a couple of things I can (and will obviously) do to prevent the water damaging my house.  Good drainage in my foundations is one of them.  I plan to dig a deep foundation trench, lay gravel, ag pipe, more gravel then larger rocks and then the foundation.  I'll slope the trench so that it follows the natural downhill of the slope and runs into the creek that borders the  property.
I will also probably dig some french drains further up hill of the house to guide the water away from the house and to a more useful place.  I'll try and build the house as high on the block as I can , but also don't want it too close to the road so there will be a balancing act there. 

Another vital part of it will be making sure the stem wall - the part of the foundation that is above ground level and forms the "boots" of the building - is high enough that any water splashing off the ground doesn't get the cob.  I will also include a damp layer in the foundations to stop rising damp.  I will have eaves that extend a good way out from the walls too - generally a standard feature of Australian houses any way - and will be collecting rain water for drinking so any splashing from water off the roof will be minimal. 

The clay soil, while being great for building a house, will also be crap for the garden.  It will need lots of compost and aerating for it to easy to grow anything.  The Lancre Witch has suggested that we slash the grass (which is currently about waist high) and leave on the ground as mulch and do that over the next few years as the building process gets going so that the as the grass breaks down it is nourishing the ground underneath.

3 tonnes of firewood - more than just fuel for the fire

We got a huge pile of wood delivered the other day.  The overwhelming thing about a huge pile of wood in your drive way is that you then need to move it somewhere else.  By hand.  The process has highlighted a couple of things for me.  That physically, I am not that great.  That to live the life I want to, I actually need to start doing it.  Now.  That it will involve physical labour like moving firewood.  That I actually don't mind that physical labour.  On days like today when I am grumpy and irritable moving the wood brought some peace to my mind.  Getting off the couch and outside into the sun using my body calmed my mind and erratic emotions. 
The reality of the huge pile of wood is more than just warmth in the middle of a very cold winter.

Jackie French's garden

http://www.jackiefrench.com/garden.html  Looks like that.  I love it.  I read her book "Backyard Self-sufficiency" last night and it is brilliant.  Previously I had only read John Seymour's self-sufficiency books and they are very different.
Jackie does gardens that require work to set up, planting and waiting and caring, while I am young and active, but by the time I am too old to prune trees, mow lawns, pick fruit from the tops of trees etc most of the garden should look after itself.  By planting groves of trees and creating an artificial forest that nonetheless takes advantage of the way actual forests grow she has managed to grow coffee bushes, avocados, bananas, and many many other plants in a similar climate to here (if anything more extreme as she quotes temperatures as low as -9 C and as high as 52 C) that I never thought I would be able to grow.  In my visions of the future things like that were things that would have to become very rare (or if TEOTWAWKI happens as I think it will non existent) and to think I could still have avocados, as a regular thing not a treat!  Even now they are a treat but it is concievable to have them all year round planting and gardening the way Jackie French does...  Unbelievable. 
The other brilliant thing about it is that it matches the type of garden I see in my head.  I have such a clear picture in my head about how my house looks and how the garden looks.  Now I have a block of land it is even clearer.  And a garden as productive as that that looks like a jungle just fits.  It matches a vague memory I have of my great grandmothers garden.  I can't have been any older than 4 but it was wonderful - full of little nooks and crannies created by well established plants and a wonderland for a small person. 
I just have to get over my gardening block.  I have always read gardening books and been totally overwhelmed.  Crop rotation, companion planting, fixing soil, rules about what works and what doesn't...  just completely outside my realm of experience and completely intimidating. 

So my gardening block is slowly melting, and my head is full of ideas.  Into a delirium of lists and plans - but I'll put those in a seperate post for ease of finding :)

random lists

Electrical stuff I plan on having ( I was going to say need but that depends entirely on your definition of 'need')
Laptop/computer
mobile phone charger
freezer
light
washing machine


don't think there is anything else off the top of my head...  Its not a long list although I am sure there would be people with a shorter one!

Random thoughts I had over the last week

 - Would like to have a seperate room with a fireplace, bath and arm chair as a retreat
 - in loft have shelving in walls for storing wool and related stuff.
 - bottles built in wall niches for candles

Not much else I can remember off the top of my head - spent the week avoiding anything too strenuous due to migraines and a bad back and my brain has apparently turned to mush...

Oh yes - also wanted to note down to build a cob chicken house and a cob rabbit hutch.  While the current bunny (Rob Anybody) is ok outside in the heavy frosts we have been having he has been moved up to the apple shed due to wind/rain etc.  I think he would generally be happier with a home that protected him from the weather better than his hutch does currently and so build one when we have our house.

We have been getting very heavy frosts quite frequently this winter (after having only one or two all season last year) and it is staying cold for a lot of the day.  While the corner we are planning on using gets the sun earlier than where we are currently living it will still be cold up there during the harsher winters.  I plan on taking advantage of the sun by building a greenhouse around the northern facing wall with a wisteria or something else that is green in summer/ bare in winter growing over it.  This will hopefully fulfil a couple of purposes.
 - Provide extra heat in winter by magnifying the sun onto the cob wall which will absorb it and then release the heat when it is cooler. 
- Provide somewhere for me to grow veges year round


Huh, apparently I had more to blather on about than I thought!

Random thoughts

- when building in windows and doors, gaps need to be left above them to allow for the cob to settle.  In "The Hand Scultped House"  they suggest waiting for the cob around the window to settle, then instal the lintle allowing room for more settling between the lintel and the glass or door .  One of the bookmarks I have (I'll sort them out one day, I swear!) has another method however - putting straw above the window/door and cover it with cob then continue building - this allows for movement and settling, insulates and would allow for quicker building.

- quick building is potentially an issue.  Depending on the weather during the summer I am building I may need to be able to have the house weather proof quicker or drying/curing conditions may not be optimal

-  because of weather concerns I will probably raise the roof first, supported on posts outside the foundations (the roof needs to have large eaves to protect the cob from weather anyway) and build the walls underneath it.  This should make it easier to build if weather is less than ideal, provide a space to store materials and tools and protect the foundations, walls and floors as we build.  The pay off for this is that finishing the walls up under the roof will be more tricky and potentially so will building the ceiling, unless the ceiling is built at the same time as the roofl