Fingers in the loving mud

I returned to Finland last Wednesday and the work started the next day. As usual, I was eager to pull the tarp off the cottage, just to see it was all still there. And it was. As usual, I was eager to get started, even though my fingers and hands were still a bit achy from the last time; it must be the repetitious movement of cob loaf making...

Here is the cottage last Friday. I started on the cordwood cob wall and continued on the other cob walls.

When I came back, my father was suffering from a flu, so he had to take a day off from building. But on Friday, busily blowing into a piece of tissue, he climbed back onto the unfinished roof and started hammering the planks to place. Over 300 metres of lumber and countless hours later, today, my father finally finished the job - wahey- thank you dad! It looks great to my eyes and the smell of new wood is lovely.

Now the next thing to do with the roof is to attach some fascia boards to the eaves, and set up the green roof. I have already ordered the plastic sheeting (8x7m), which will have an underlay and some carpet and styrofoam sheets as insulation (which I had available in any case). Over that I will add some soil and shallow-rooted plants, including different berry plants, like wild strawberry, lingonberry and bilberry, which are native to the surrounding forest anyway.

My son and niece walking on the cob wall :)

Since last Thursday, I have been working on building the cob and cordwood cob walls. My mother has been mixing the cob with me, and occasionally also my son - and even my 8-year old niece was joining the muddy fun. It is lovely to see big and small people getting their hands and feet dirty - stomping on cob with bare feet initially makes most people tickle, me included, so a lot of giggles ensued. However, it's a long and slow process to mix and build with the stuff, so children find it hard to keep at it for a longer period of time and I can't blame them. Plus catching frogs and lizards is more fun! My mother keeps asking me from time to time: aren't you bored of the work yet? And somehow I just can't lie to her and say: no, not yet. :)

Muddy happy children.

Our friendly neighbour offered his time and help once again, so I asked if he wanted to set the windows into the south wall, where I had left an opening for them. Jani put braces in the wood frames and set them in the cob shelf and each other with pieces of screws and wood (also poking out of them to use as 'keys' for catching on the cob). After I piled some cob to the sides of the window frames, they feel really solid and are not going anywhere in a hurry. Now I just hope they haven't twisted too badly for me to be able to get the actual glass in at a later point. But it's a lovely feeling to have windows! Such a small thing, yet makes the cottage look like a real dwelling somehow.

Here I am cobbing behind the newly installed windows (that were given to me second-hand by our family friend)

A lot has happened in less than a week, so I am intending to write this blog at least once a week to keep you updated about what's happening, particularly since I will be in Finland until the beginning of September this time around. By then a lot has to be done and as expected, work is slow. But I am very happy that in the end of every day when I take a photo of the cottage and pull the tarp back on it for the night, I can see progress. I can see nature. I can see love. And I can see myself as a little child. And the little child in me now as an adult.

And many times, even when I am picking up cordwood logs, inserting bottles in the wall, sculpting shelves or just designing in my head, I feel so very blessed and lucky to be doing this - and to be loving this. I hope this photo says it all. :)

Here are few more photos of the happenings of the week. More to follow in a week. Tomorrow I will take a day off and take my son to a big amusement park in Helsinki. I realised that the only way to keep sane is to stop work once in a while, rest my body and remove myself from the site. Otherwise I will just longingly gaze out of the kitchen window and answer the cottage siren's call (to work)... :)

Internal space - I love the colour of the wood in the evening sun.

Cottage after Saturday's work. It is starting to take shape.

A big blue bottle (slightly broken at the top) my mum gave me and which I inserted into a cobbed shelving in the entrance. It creates a lovely colourful light in the wall opposite (see right).

 
These photos were taken tonight, after the day's work.The weather's been mostly great, although at times too hot and humid for pleasurable working. But, I am addicted to the work and regardless of the weather, keep plodding on. With my hands in the loving mud. With my loving hands in the mud. I shall get there... :)

The beautiful smell of wood

While I am building my cottage, it seems that it is my heart that is mostly in control. For the last 2.5 weeks I have worked and worked and worked, and even though my body is very tired, my heart has only grown fonder of the place I am creating, together with my family and some occasional visiting volunteers. When I sit inside the half-finished structure and watch the long blades of grass and hay sway in the wind, with the forest behind them, lit by the summer sun, I know I made the right decision to let my heart be crazy and free...

Now back in London again, for a short, 8 day respite, I realise that while in Finland I am so consumed by the act of working with my hands, that it is difficult to use that side of my brain, which forms coherent meaningful sentences about what's happened... i.e. the reason for not updating this blog for a month! It seems I always need to come back to my little London nest to regurgitate what's going on inside of my head, yet by the time that happens, my head is usually overflowing and the thoughts are often an abstract trickle down the stream of subconscious alleyways... :)

The main thing to say is: I am happy. I am happy how it has gone, how it is looking, how much I have been blessed by the help of others and especially my father, whose input in the cottage has become immeasurably important. Even though he never had much faith in himself to be building something so unusual like my cottage, and felt really out of depth to start with; together we have pondered on my design, the choices and funds I have available, the materials we use - with that, he has managed to build a wonderful wooden structure for me, tirelessly working, even in his retirement age, on the top of my roof, while the rain showers in the last few days soaked him through. It brings a tear to my eye, honestly, even though as a typical, modest Finnish man, he is the last to take much credit on his work. Or speak about it. It has also been lovely to hang out as father and daughter, something I don't normally get much chance to do, and maybe, to be honest, never really have. Men are often doers, not talkers, so it's been nice to have a point of interest, which is doing, but doing with a meaning that doesn't require too many words.

My father working on the roof yesterday.

It hasn't been plain sailing of course, sometimes I have even been sad and distressed, wondering whether I really have it in me to finish this little place and whether I am able to find a balance between 'getting on with it' and mindful creating and decision making. Plans change, because things don't work out, volunteers are suddenly unable to come, pains take over the body, strange chemistry between people makes atmosphere tense, materials cost more than expected or are not available etc etc - the list goes on and on. But for some reason, when I look out of the kitchen window at my parents house, I see this little unfinished house under the tarp, standing in the sun, wind and rain, born from my dream, on my childhood land. How could I not love it? How could I not build it? Never thought I could love a pile of wood, mud and sand so much! :)

I am adding photos from the last 2.5 weeks here, with some captions to detail the process that the cottage has gone through since the last time you read this blog. Apart from the last day, I took no days off, and even though I worked on the cottage constantly, at times, it was hard to see any progress. Yet, when I myself look back at the photos I have taken, it is very plain to see that a lot has happened in quite a short time (four weeks). A piece by piece this little earth tree house is coming along. I have no idea whether it will end up looking like the one in my sketches or dreams, but that is the beauty of creating: the neverending wonderment of  life unfolding and changing the outcome of every moment, every day. It's an organic process - so I will see when I get there. :)

This is what I went back to in the end of July. My father is peeling logs from the forest for my cordwood cob wall.

A view from inside the cottage, while I was filling the earthbags, with earth, sand and clay. I love this view, looking out to the sunny green. This will also be the view from the two windows, which will sit on the wall in front.

Where I got to by Sunday, before my German volunteers arrived.

Nora and Mathias working on the earthbag mix.

Nora and Mathias joined the build from Germany for about 4 days. For them it was a different kind of experience as they had never done any natural building. However, even in the heat of the sun, they seemed to get into the swing of things pretty quickly. It was great that while they were doing mixes and completing the earthbag stemwall, I could then dedicate some time to planning the reciprocal roof with my father. 

A small reciprocal roof test model we made with branches in the woods. Just to see if/how it works, before attempting to move the 4 metre long roundwood poles on the roof... it was lovely to discover it does work :)

Twin birch trees that my father checked to have some internal rot and promised for firewood for Jani, his neighbour, as long as Jani would take them down and that I could take the bark off them for my use.

Our friendly neighbour, Jani, sawing the trunk into manageable pieces for me to remove the bark from.

Here is some of the bark I removed from the birches. The better quality ones I have put under a weight and use for crafts and the ones with more 'scabs', I am using over the earthbags, underneath the cobwall and strawbalewall, to create a naturally waterproof barrier to prevent moisture from the earth and bags wicking up to the walls above.

Building the roof was one of the bigger decisions I took but I figured it would make life so much easier later on. It is nice to be non-dependent on the weather when building, to have some shade from the sun (the site is very sunny) and also, to properly 'feel' that one is actually building a dwelling, rather than some elaborate wall structure. It is so very true that the minute the reciprocal basic structure was completed, the cottage was officially feeling like a cottage, finished or not. It had dimensions!

This is how we started the roof, with one top of the felled birch trees in the middle as a 'Charlie stick', on which all the roundwood poles of the roof would rest, while piling them on top (after which the charlie stick was removed). To be honest, even though we had tried the design out in small scale, it was at times pretty hard to imagine we would ever manage to make a working roof using this method. In the end, we ended up shifting and shoving the Charlie stick around a bit, to change the dimensions of the central skylight hole (which was tiny at first). The fact that the cottage is not a complete circle also made it more tricky to get the spacing between poles right. With my forgotten maths skills, I attempted to calculate the angle that the poles would have to lie in, so that the roof wouldn't have too steep a pitch for a green roof, yet have some space underneath for me to build a sleeping platform on.

Well, we managed to build the structure in the end. To the primary eight poles, another 16 secondary roof rafters were added. An interesting choice, to provisionally tie the poles together that would have some give, as well as grip on the slippery wood poles, was to use strips of real leather from my mother's abundant fabric stash. But hey, it worked! :)

This is how the cottage looked after a hard working Friday. What a beautiful weather too. A glass of wine and I felt very happily tearful looking at this sweet little fairie house. :)

My volunteers left on Saturday, but of course for me the work continued. I continued building the cob wall, which Nora and Mathias has started and tried out where the windows would be and how they would be set into the wall. Even though covered under the tarp, the earthbags were drying fast, and I hammered metal rods through the five completed rows of bags, to increase their overall, uniform stability (as I decided not to use barbed wire, which is normally used for this purpose). I had decided to make 5 rows of bags instead of the original four, because I thought they will raise the wall further off the ground for the strawbales particularly. In the end, we ran out of bags at the end of the wall. I counted how many we needed. 10. I knew how many I had left in London (which I didn't take as I didn't think we would need them): 10.
Nothing like a meticulous guesswork at planning stage.... :)

Because I was now working on the cobwalls on my own, my mother felt sorry for me and came to help. She found it hard to form cob loaves crouching down on the ground but wanted to help to make and mix the cob for me. It's not rocket science exactly (after all, my mother just said the other day while mixing: good god, one could be pretty much braindead and still be able to do this job) - but I must say that after few days of mixing, my mother managed to make better and stronger mixes than me - so I generally just concentrated on building the walls and thanking the universe for my mother! This also includes the heavenly blueberry pies that she kept making, while disappearing into the kitchen from time to time. :)

My mother sorting bilberries she picked in the woods around the cottage. The bushes are brimming with blue - and you can see the thrushes and other birds like them too - judging by their deep blue poo...

A Forest Mandala I made from the wild flowers and moss from the woods.

Some beautiful, young oak leaves in a tree (or rather a bush) next to the cottage.

My feet in the mud, on a cloudy day under the tarp.

 
So, a lot of mixing, stomping, forming, patting, poking later, I was still working on getting few centrimetres added to the cob walls....in other words, slow going. While my parents enjoyed their 42nd wedding anniversary and took a break from helping me, I decided to try my hands on mortaring the base of a cob/pizza oven with natural stones I had picked up from the close-by sand pit. Not really knowing what I was doing, I started piling stones on one another and slapping some sand/lime putty mortar in between them. After two half days, the result wasn't pretty but was still standing, so who knows, it may end up being an oven one of these days... :) I am still yet to find a good place for rocks and stones, without having to buy them, as I am intending to cover the whole external earthbagwall with natural stone (for visuals and rain protection). Well, things seem to have a way of sorting themselves out, so maybe my stone pile treasure is also waiting for me at the end of a rainbow somewhere...

Here are some photos of the last week's slow cobbing progress:

Beginnings of the entrance and cob walls, the other wallspace will be for strawbale (North and NE walls)

Here you can see a bit of the natural stone foundation around the to-be cob oven. In the clay base of the oven, I am using a normal cob mix, without the straw and some ceramic leca-gravel added for insulation. All this is trial and error type of building, guided by what I am feeling could work rather than any professional understanding or skill... we shall see.
My father is sawing the planks for the roof, which all need to be individually measured to match the 'organic' design, shape and pitch of the roof. Thank you dad for your love, endurance and patience. :)

This is how I left the cob wall yesterday. I have started to extend the cob over the earthbags and it makes quite a bit of difference visually. I have no idea whether it will actually hold, since the earthbag material is quite slippy, but I have tried to poke it in with a 'cobber's thumb' ie. a piece of root I am working with for a tighter fit.

And below is the progress of the beautiful reciprocal wooden roof being built. I have so far bought 200metres of lumber to cover the area and I will need to buy some 70 metres more to fully cover it. I had seen some photos of people only loosely covering the spaces in between the roof poles but thought that despite of the added cost and time factor, the roof will be stronger to take on the heavy snowloads in the winter if it's tightly planked together. One of these, MuTu- moments, which in Finnish means roughly 'I feel it through', rather than actually knowing it. :)

The roof being decked out, I very much like the look of it.

 

Detail of the roof.

Me thinks it's pretty - and the fresh wood smells delicious!

My father in the process of nailing planks in.

Right, here we are, after another period of working in the forest, I have the foundation, the beginning of the walls, the basic roof structure. I still have to: fix the design of the cordwood cob wall and start building it, place the windows in the South wall and 'cob them in', finish all the walls, make a door, re-string 60 strawbales, order plastic for the roof, build the green roof, build base and top plate for the strawbale wall, complete the oven, make space for the round window, build the stone exterior stemwall, lime-plaster exterior walls, make internal floor and all internal work, including building a sleeping platform high up towards the roof. And this is without any actual design aspects which I am so keenly been waiting to work on... In fact, I have pretty much given up on the idea of finishing this cottage this summer. I mean, it may be possible but - I don't want to rush it, hurt my body in the process and get stressed. I didn't set on this journey to have a sour face.I set on it because the thought of this cottage made my heart pound and jump with joy. The journey has begun but is far from finished.I hope to finish it with a smile on my face and the forest in my heart.

In the meanwhile, the forest of my childhood looks as pretty as ever, even with a threatening thunderstorm in the distance. I love this place. The more I love it, the more I live it. The more I live it, the more I fall in love with it. It pays to go away, in order to return. Sometimes it's the only way - even for a forest fairie. x

Back in London, I am now attempting to collate my thoughts and experiences from the last two weeks in Finland. I still remember the feeling sitting inside the wooden skeleton of my to-be-cottage yesterday, in the warm sun, hearing the little insects all around me, the busy bluetits, pretty blackbirds and one tireless cuckoo somewhere in the forest. My mood elevated, I was thinking: I can actually sit inside this thing! It is a THING - not completed, not even close - but - it is a shelter! Built with my very own hands, and the hands of my family members. How special is that...!

My work in progress cottage covered by a tarp, ready for my next working trip to the forest.

It may not look like much yet, but has so much heart for me already. When I flew to Finland two weeks ago, I really didn't know what to expect. In some ways it was, and still is, much like guesswork. I have lots of ideas but have no ideas on how long it will take to make them into reality... :)

The site in the Spring time, after the foundation hole has been dug and some large tree stumps removed from the area.

The foundation trench, or rather a big gaping hole, had already been dug when I got to the site. It was  about 70cm deep and I could see that the bottom of the foundation was partly on hard clay, partly on sand. It wasn't sloping quite enough downhill to my liking, considering that I wanted it to be able to drain well in case of a heavy rain.

The first few days in Finland I spent ordering and buying tools and supplies, opening builder's accounts at local hardware stores and thinking things through. The gravel ended up costing much more than I expected but I did order about 18tonnes of it, because most of the soil in the foundation was replaced by it (and sand). Maybe I'm daft but it somehow made sense, to improve drainage, stop moisture from getting to the walls, roundwood poles or the floor.

In regards to the other main building materials, I was lucky that just around the corner from my parents house, there is a disused sand-pit, where we used to play as kids - I got permission from the elderly owner to take some sand for my building needs from there. My parents' friendly neighbour was kind enough to help us out with his pick-up/trailer combination to get the sand from the pit to the site. Even the heavy rain showers and us workers getting completely soaked, didn't stop us from shoveling the sand, tired, on a Friday evening. Just a small problem, which sauna will ultimately cure... which seems to be the thinking with most Finnish ailments. :)

I have added a compilation of photos here, to show you the progress so far. I have tried to write captions for the photos instead of writing the entire story, because it would take me the other two weeks I have in London and not get anything else done! I still have a life you know... ;)
 

Strawbales were delivered, only for me to discover that they were far too loosely baled! Many bales fell apart when we were transferring them to storage. Which means in order to use them in my cottage wall, I will need to re-string most of the bales (those that are used in the cob mix obviously do not matter).

Regardless of the first setback of the poor bales, I set to work and started working on improving the drainage of the site. Here I am, shoveling away, with my son showing me his Lego creation in the latter photo. :)

I dug a drainage channel from the foundation trench downhill, for the rain water to run away from underneath the house. 8cm perforated drainage pipe was installed at the bottom of it.

After the digging, we started filling the hole with all that gravel. Wow, the amount of work involved, particularly as the gravel was located about 50-70metres away. I feel my biceps have definitely grown! :) I hired a light-weight compacting machine, which I used regularly over the gravel, to compact it nice and tight. Much better result than doing it by hand, although it was not exactly any easier on my muscles.

Round and round we go :)

A digger came for the 2nd time to dig a clay pit in the woods. After excavation, this pit was covered with tarp until later use and will become a natural swimming pool in the future (well, I would like to think so at least).

Because I was too worried about the quality and strength of my strawbales, I consulted few professional natural builders and decided to build a wooden structure for my cottage- so rather than using the bales as supporting walls, I would have the wooden skeleton to support the weight of the roof. As it happens, Charlie Jespergaard from the Natural Building Company, whom I visited in Fagervik during my first week in Finland, showed me how the bales could be re-compressed, re-strung and in fact used as I had initially intended, but I still decided it would be less risky to build the wooden frame and use the bales more as an infill material.

Here I am fetching one piece of wood to be used in the wooden frame structure. These logs my father had cut down from the surrounding woods a few months earlier and peeled and stacked them up to dry.

Measuring the wood poles to correct size.

My father cutting the poles with a chainsaw.

Here I am placing the roundwood poles in their final positions. The shape of the cottage won't be exactly round, more like oval shape, with a larger gap between the logs in the south facing wall, to accomodate the window frame or frames (as I haven't decided which way the windows are going to lie, vertically or horizontally...)

My father working on the wooden frame. We used Tony Wrench's book 'Building A Low Impact Roundhouse' as a rough guide and reference book. My father was a bit unsure about the whole procedure at first but after a day or so, he really got into it and the quality of his work improved massively. I am very proud of him and happy to have been able to have worked and assisted him. :)

The completed wooden structure (without roof obviously).

Here I am tarring the logs that were used in the wooden frame. We attached the ends of the poles onto watertreated wood panels along with some tarred roofing paper and then the 'legs' were set onto compacted gravel base and more gravel was spread over them and compacted well (the ends of the logs are therefore not in direct contact with soil and hopefully never too much water either, to prevent them from rotting). The tar smells wonderful, although I must admit, whilst applying it, the smell was slightly OVERWHELMING! ;) I could have used concrete and steel posts with the wooden poles to avoid all this hassle, but I don't want to pour concrete into my sacred space (which this for me is, as a place where I grew up as a child)

While my father was working on the wooden frame, I kept on filling the area around the wooden poles and compacting the gravel and sand that was added in the central area (which is to become the internal floor). The wooden roundwood poles are the internal dimensions of the cottage, which will be about 3.70-3.80m in diameter.

Peace!

When the wooden frame was joined to form a uniform, stable structure, I had only few more days left in Finland. This meant that the whole structure needed to be covered, to be protected from elements but also to enable me to keep working in dry conditions underneath. To be honest, until then it had only rained briefly on few occasions but the idea of attempting to build cob and strawbale walls in rain, with swarming mosquitoes around (there are many!), didn't appeal to me too much.

Preparing to get the tarpaulin on the structure.

Here I am on the top of the ladder, trying to maneuver the massive blanket of plastic on this thing (with my brother and father)!

I started filling the first rows of earthbags with gravel (the same that was used for the floor).There will be in total of four rows of bags in the stemwall, on top of which the cob, cordwood cob and strawbale walls will be built.

I managed to fill the first row of bags, almost all of them with gravel. When that run out, I filled the remaining bags with clay/sand/earth mixture, which I left to dry and harden under the tarpaulin, while I am away. This will also give me a good indication of whether the mix I used has a good ratio and consistency for the remaining earthbags.

So, here we are. There is so much else to say and write but I am still quite exhausted from the first episode of build and want to focus on the next time I get to go there. I have done some video filming also and my friend and regular cameraman Mikael will come and visit me in the next few months to do some dedicated filming of the progress (with me included in the footage, which doesn't hugely appeal to me as a director...)

I am so very grateful to my family in Finland, who have worked so hard on this with me, particularly my father, without whom getting to this point in the build would have been incredibly slow, difficult, maybe even impossible. But, I still believe, as I have done before, that nothing is impossible where dreams and heart are involved. Not with me, not with anyone. Even though this cottage is far from finished, it is incredibly satisfying to be able to work with one's hands - and see, touch and smell the results.I kid you not, it may be one of the best experiences in the world!!! So, please try it, if you haven't... :)

A few days ago, on the last evening of my first two weeks in Finland, I poured a glass of red wine for myself and went out to the cottage, sat in front of it and watched the forest in the evening sun, with my giant wishing tree and its leaves fluttering in the gentle breeze. I was so loving the look and the sound of it. It brought a tear to my eye to think that I am allowed to be here, to dig up this earth, to use this wood, to work with people I love, to listen to these birds, to participate in nature, to feel gratefulness, to witness beauty, to feel with all my heart, to learn, to appreciate, to be grateful, to be human. To be part of it all. Part of nature.

That is all I ever could have wished for. Thank you tree - for listening to me.

My giant wishing tree (aspen) in the background, as seen through two conjoined birch trees.