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October
2004 As
you will have seen in the Latest
News section,
our beautiful house was hit by an unknown
arsonist and destroyed on the evening of Monday
25th October. All we are left with (apart
from the cob walls and the option to rebuild
from that stage again...) are our photographs and
memories of this beautiful home. This last
Building Diary Update will bring you up to where the
house was at, as we had been unable to update for
a while due to computer trouble.
Once the inside of the roof was insulated and had
its first scratch coat of plaster, we began
on the second coat. This consisted of 3 parts sand,
1/2 a part of clay, 1/4 part of screened shredded
straw, and 1/8 part of flour paste. This made
a gorgeous plaster, which set hard and dry and
didn’t dust at all. Once we had plastered
all of the upstairs we began downstairs, apart
from the north facing walls, which were plastered
with a hemp and lime plaster.
Onto the joists upstairs we laid planed 6” by
1/2” larch boards, and onto those we
put the rather good SilentTop system, with newspaper
batts and soundproofing timbers. You can find
out more about it at ecologicalbuildingsystems.com,
they also supply the Solitex Roofing Felt
that we used. They are pioneering lots of very
interesting ecological building materials,
and we found them very helpful. Onto here we were
to lay local kiln dried beech floorboards, but
we never reached that stage. The radial beams
that so many visitors were impressed by were covered
with boards cut to the angles of the beams, like
a spiders web, which took a while but looked
great.
Downstairs we began to fit the windows, and 3 days
before the fire had just taken delivery of
all the remaining windows, beautiful frames made
with our own Western Red Cedar timber. They
were made by the wonderful Tim Rowe from Bantry,
you’ll find him in the phone book, suffice
to see he makes great windows. The frames
were sat onto a local slate sill and then fitted
into the walls with galvo strap, and then
plastered in with lime plaster. We had begun
to cob around the stove also, and were about half
way up the walls with that. We were also putting
the shelves into the niches, which were looking
gorgeous. Few things in life can bring a man more
pleasure than fitting shelves into the hand
cobbed niche which will be home to his stereo.
There is something uniquely gorgeous about plastered
cob walls. They have such a massive presence
but look cuddly and human scale at the same time. Their
soft undulating curves are a joy. I felt sure that
we had created a home that would melt the
heart of anyone entering it. Clearly I was wrong.
On the next page, I will post pictures of the house
after the fire, be warned, they are not a
pretty sight. Please click
here.
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