I’ve been getting some great comments on the blog lately, some of which I’m putting out front, like this one.
“masterofhounds has left a new comment on your post ‘Couple Seeking Bona Fide Inexpensive Eco-Opportunity in New England’:
You guys should move to Northern California. New England has lost the Back to the Land flair it had in the 1970’s-80’s. Wild crafting with your dog, that screams Bay Area!
Below comment on my posting of last week revealed that the entire out-of-print book (a treasure) is available via Google. Here’s one of the color paintings (not by Sydney Jones):
“depatty has left a new comment on your post Old English Country Cottage”:
Just FYI. Old English Country Cottages is available from Google Books at https://is.gd/eLCqO for viewing and PDF download. Thanks for posting about it, it has some really nice illustrations!
Dave”
Sydney R. Jones was an English artist around the turn of the century who did exquisite drawings of English country life. Back in the 70s, I collected a number of books (via printed catalogs and mail order) with drawings and photos of English cottages. This drawing is from the book Old English Country Cottages, published in 1906. Note the four beehives (skeps).
Our hexagonal tower with its new shake roof. Shakes hand-split by Bruno Atkey on Vancouver Island, applied by Billy Cummings (I was recovering from a wrist operation). There’s a 6-sided copper cap, a piece of 3/4″ copper pipe, which is flared out at the end and holds a quartz crystal from Nepal (that I got at the Green Festival in San Francisco). If you’re standing in the right spot at the right time of day, it sparkles in the sunshine. (Got the idea from my friend Louie Frazier.)
Lew discovered this great sleeping platform on https://thistinyhouse.com. I traced it back to https://is.gd/eFdz4, but there’s no indication of where it is, or who shot the photo. I might just build something like this. The roof keeps fog and dew off the bed, yet the steep angle allows you to see a lot of the sky. Can anyone track this down?
Dear Lloyd Kahn and Co.,
My 45 year-old English husband, who has a log house-building qualification from the Log and Timber School in Vancouver, and I, a 35 year-old New Yorker with excellent knowledge of gardening and gathering wild foods (notably the growing of herbal plants), are looking for a suitable training opportunity to commence as soon as possible.
Yesterday was brutal. 100º. Us Northern Calif. coastal people are weather wimps. If it’s 90 we start melting. If it’s 35, we get frostbite. So this 3-day heat wave, where it went from high 40’s (at night) to 60º higher, was a shock. Lew and I worked in the office yesterday, whew! At the end of the day I went down to the beach. The water coming out of the lagoon was relatively warm, maybe 60s, and I stood waist-deep in the cool water. The stress of the day vapoorized. Dove in, body cooled. A young local surfer/skater bro came walking by in the shallows, and said, “Paradise!”
A few days ago, some doves flew off when Lesley walked out to feed the chickens, and she reached up and grabbed a feather in mid-air that was floating down. Very delicate little 2″ feather. Seemed like a good omen.
Here’s a rough photo of some rough layouts of the tiny houses book. I am having fun!
I am selling the 20 sided house that I built in Topham, VT ten years ago. The house is almost round and has great southern exposure with lots of windows on the south side. It has a massive central chimney made of old concrete road culvert tiles that holds heat well and distributes it throughout the space. The main timbers for walls, floors and roof are softwood poles harvested locally. The top floor is wide pine boards, with some 24″ boards. The sole source of heat is a woodstove and the water for the clawfoot tub is heated by a gas fired on-demand hot water heater. Water is gravity fed and comes from a spring.
Joe Golden
Traditional stilt house in the lagoon of Messolongi, Western Greece. Until 1700, Messolonghi was under the control of Venice. Its inhabitants were mostly fishermen who lived in cabins called “pelades, “made of a kind of waterproof straw and reed and standing on stilts above the water.