Interns of The Solar Living Institute: Natural Building Intensive: Final Days of Dirt

It's getting down to the wire. 2 days to go and on our to-do list:

- design and build the stained glass wall
- fill in sides of front wall
- plaster
- take a shower

Before we could plaster up the front, we had to fill it with earth, but more importantly, we used a natural building technique that incorporated glass bottles to give the effect of stained glass. You can use any bottles - we used old wine and spirit bottles (patron tequila bottles are the best, ps). Brittany and Eric designed a spiral pattern. They outlined their design on a piece of plywood that was temporarily fixed to the exterior of the wall. On the interior, they fastened a wire mesh wall, into which the bottles would be attached with pieces of wire.

Britt adding the bottles to mesh wire

Final design, ready for clay

Once the bottles were snugly wired in, we filled in the area surrounding the bottles with straw clay. Next, we cut out the wire in front of each bottle and removed it (after taking down the plywood). Now, the bottles were fully exposed in the spiral pattern, magically suspended between the clay mix! Make a few adjustments here and there to refine the shaping around the bottles, and you have a gorgeous handmade glass design within your wall. I love this feature of natural building; It ads such a personalized, unique artsy touch.

Moving right along ... to the left and right of the bottle design, we built 2 "quick and dirty" walls. On the outsides of the frames we stapled a reed mat, leaving an opening at the top. Into that opening, we poured wood shavings (the owner of the property mills his own wood, so these were the byproduct of his effort) tossed with clay silt. This filling was somewhat fluffy; it kinda reminded me of popcorn slathered in butter. We poured that mixture into the wall, nailed it shut and it was the ready to be plastered.

Last but not least: Plaster. This is the layer you put on the outside of the walls you just filled, in order to make it look really nice (and insulate, protect it, etc). We used a mix of, you guessed it, straw, clay dirt, straw and sand. It had a more goopy texture so you could just palm it onto the back of the wall, let it stick, then smoothe in the edges so it blended altogether. Once there was enough on to cover it uniformly, we used a trowel to smoothe the surface. We did this to the back wall, inside and out of the clay waddle wall, as well as on the outside of the front wall (the last wall & roof will be completed at a later date.)

The back side fully plastered. (Brandon contemplates.)

This is as far as we got building the composting toilet structure over our 5 day course. Not too shabby for beginners! That afternoon, we opted to visit Massey's place. She and her 3 roommates (all natural builders) share a piece of property. Initially, it consisted of a main house and a large garden out back; however, they're in the process of building their own individual "pods" along side the garden. These pods are naturally built, personally designed bedrooms. It was pretty amazing to see their works in progress, some of which were already completed and lived in. We spent the afternoon here, helping out where we could and working on the floor of Massey's pod. We chose to do this over working more on the toilet. Can you blame us?