natural building

while this house incorporates something as far from natural as shipping containers, we also will incorporate techniques such as straw bale infill walls, natural plasters and some natural tree trunks as beams and support for the stair case. But, that will be next summer, when we start the job up again. The last thing that we did was return to the site in Dec. to get an inspection on the rough plumbing and the placement and welding of the containers so that we could get another 180 day stretch of time on our building permit. So now we are good till sometime in June. Really, the permit is good for 4 years, but they want to avoid having jobs abandoned, so they put the stipulation of building activity (needing an inspection), every 180 days. It doesn't make sense that anyone who has spent as much effort on the project as we have would abandon it, but that is the requirement.

More natural building

Here are couple more photos of some of the natural buildings we were around or worked on while in Tlaxcala. One is of a staircase using a juniper tree trunk, and the other is of an adobe wall, with decorative natutral earthen plaster (which, when it includes some of the sap from a cactus pad and is polished, reamains quite water proof).

We also went to visit David Laws, who lives at the end of the Mississippi neighborhood and is trained as in classical Japanese carpentry and joinery. We visited his shop and a job that he is doing in Vancouver, and we saw some very fine, elegant work in the traditional Japanese style. If anyone would like something done in that style, from garden house to a whole house, he is the man to talk to

natural building in Mexico

We haven't posted anything lately because the weather here is not conducive to working on the project, and also because we were in Mexico working at a project we support there. It involves reforestation and also classes in natural building. We are including some photos of some of the buildings there and hope that they will be of interest to some of you.

This is an old adobe house that is being rebuilt with various techniques, including cob and straw bale as well as adobe.

What you are looking at here is an adobe floor, finished with linseed oil and beeswax.