Recycled Eco Buildings and Wildlife Friendly Food Forest Garden. Mosaics and Glass Bottle Walls.
It has been almost a year since we last wrote about the Community Garden that we are part of in our local town, Ballaghaderreen. A lot has happened in that time and we would like to share some of the highlights with you here.
Making leaf mould last autumn.
When we started to work planting our forest garden seven years ago there was nowhere covered outside to escape to in case of a shower. As we have plenty of showers in the West of Ireland, we remedied the situation by building an eco-friendly gazebo from materials that we had available. If you would like to make one for yourself you can find tips and instructions in this post.
We have to admit to a love of colours. Our house is full of them. We definitely do not subscribe to a less is more approach when it comes to decorating our house. We are firm believers in that vibrant colours enhance mood and create a happy and relaxed atmosphere in the home.
We think that light is one of the most important factors to consider when building or renovating a house. We wanted as much light as possible when we extended our cottage a few years ago and as we also wanted to be as sustainable and eco-friendly as possible we decided to build sections of our walls from glass bottles and jars.
This is possibly our last post in the series about our roundhouse construction. We have now reached the top of the building and will tell you about our roof. Reciprocal roofs have probably been around for millennia or at least from the 12th century in China and Japan.
Our cottage before the extension.
Following on from this earlier post about the groundwork, here comes a post about the foundation and main wood frame construction on our reciprocal roofed roundhouse. We put down a layer of builders sand all over the floor area and raked it out until it was even. On top of this we placed a waterproof membrane. At the eight posts we added extra pieces of membrane between the concrete foundations and the posts.
We moved into our cottage in January 2013. Even before we bought it, we had decided that we would add a round house extension to it, with a reciprocal roof. These types of houses have been built for thousands of years, mainly in China and Japan. It is a very economical and environmentally sound way of building, and can be adapted to suit many climates and site conditions. We would like to share our experience of the build with our readers here, in case someone would like to embark on a similar project.
We are nearing the completion of our extension build. It has been a long laborious journey, hundreds and hundreds of hours of digging drainage ditches, filling tyres with soil for the retaining wall and stripping bark of the logs for the main construction. We have also managed to finish the whole mosaic floor, the only thing it needs now is a final layer of grout to smooth it out and a polish. We are happy with the results and will write a bit more about it and show you some more pictures after the final polish.
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