Hey Lloyd:
Just thought your readers might like to know… we are giving away a copy of The Genius of Japanese Carpentry for free. It’s an excellent book… extremely awe-inspiring to see the images and drawings of some recent traditional temple renovation and construction in Japan. Mind-boggling timber framing and attention to detail. The title says it all. They don’t mess around.
www.theyearofmud.com/2014/08/05/genius-of-japanese-carpentry
– ziggy
Brian ‘Ziggy’ Liloia – Natural Building Workshops & more at The Year of Mud: https://www.theyearofmud.com
A great crowd at Gallery Bookshop in Mendocino last night for my Tiny Homes on the Move slideshow. In addition to the 50 or so mobile homes I showed, we talked about farming, building methods and materials, the ’60s*, and building codes. I looked at the roomful of people — we were all on the same page — causing me to reflect on who are these people, who are “we?”
Dwell magazine, bless its sterile heart, is the completely other side of the picture and, due to its popularity, I would guess our group is in the minority — kind of like the book lovers in Fahrenhei 451. I’ve been trying to define the characteristics of our group. We believe in doing things with our own hands…natural materials…craftsmanship…working kitchens…solar heated water…colorful interiors…Feng shui…gardens, chickens, foraging. One of these days I’ll write something about who we are. In the meantime, heh-heh, check out https://www.theshelterblog.com; this is the kind of stuff we like.
*I said to someone recently, “Well, the ’60s happened in the ’70s — no actually, the ’60s happened in the ’60s and the ’70s — and she said, “The ’60s are still happening.” In many cases, being rediscovered.
Rick Gordon has built it and we’ve been tinkering with it for a few months, and finally it feels ready to go. Whereas my blog is all over the place, The Shelter Blog will focus on homes, building, carpentry, gardening, farming, foraging, fishing, homesteading and the home arts. Check it out here:
https://www.theshelterblog.com
Note: it’s theshelterblog.com, not shelterblog.com. You need the article the.
I’m really excited by this. It’s as important — maybe in the long run more so — than one of our books. We have no competition here, since we have feedback from our 40 years publishing books on the subject of shelter. Plus we can share brand-new incoming photos and stories rather than wait years to get same into a book. It’ll be complimentary to our books.
We guarantee at least one new post per day, hope to get multiple posts daily as we get rolling.
Tags: architecture, barns, builders, carpentry, cooking, crafts, fishing, food, foraging, gardening, homes, homesteading, small homes, solar, tiny homes, tiny homes on the move, tiny houses, tools, vehicles, woodwork
“A magical cabin converted from a watermill by a Serbian painter whose father owned and operated minimills along this Bosnian river.”
Photo by Brice Portolano
From Cabin Porn here.
From top down:
-Elegant steep gable house on 28th Ave near Balboa in SF. How come you never see anything this cool in Dwell Magazine?
-House frame in Vallejo, hip roof, nice little understated dormer. You can learn a lot just studying this nicely-proportioned frame.
-If you remember when skateboards were like this, you are pretty old. In the 40s we used to take apart clamp-on-to-yr.-shoe skates and nail them on a piece of wood. This is in the window at The Purple Skunk Skate on Geary Blvd. in SF.
-Ducati on street in SF. I like seeing the frame, as with the house in Vallejo.
-Bambi Airstream, obviously a new one, Novato
Boy, I love getting out and around, shooting pics.
“Ryan Mitchell lives and breathes tiny houses. He has been running the popular website The Tiny Life for the past five years; is currently planning a tiny house conference for approximately 120 people in Charlotte, N.C., where he lives; and has written a book on tiny living that’s due to be published in July. To top it off, he recently finished construction on a tiny house of his very own…”
Click here.
Did I have fun yesterday! Breakfast at the Palace Restaurant in Monroe — was turned onto it by young locals at the Bibi Restaurant the night before — you want real local food? Well, yeh-us!…May have been best restaurant breakfast ever. Eggs scrambled in butter, creamy grits, crisp bacon, homemade biscuits and the capper: $3.80 + good coffee. Then I had a few hours before heading to the airport and I drove around shooting photos. The building are wonderful here, even the falling-apart ones. Learned that Monroe was THE big town in NC,before Charlotte rose to prominence. There were obviously some BUILDERS in Monroe in the day…I’m overwhelmed with things to do here, stuff to report from the trip, taking off for Hong Kong in 5 days…eek…
“I spend perhaps an inordinate amount of time looking at images of axes. There’s just something about them. I think that axes will never go out of fashion, nor will they cease to be useful in their multitude of functions. Over the hundreds of thousands of years they have been in use by humankind, any number of styles, shapes, and sizes have been made to perform a variety of splitting, chopping, and shaping work. It’s the sheer variety, and the craftsmanship that I am most attracted to, I think. Of course I love using them, too, probably more than any other hand tool.
To celebrate the axe and the people who continue to make them, here is a selection of 26 modern day (steel) axes made by a variety of craftspeople that are beautiful, functional, and swoon-worthy.…”
-Ziggy
Click here.
From Cheryl Long, Editor, The Mother Earth News
See also “Ziggy’s Cob Cottage,” pp.110-113, Tiny Homes: Simple Shelter
“In 2012 Alek Lisefski wasn’t sure where he would end up living, but he was certain that he didn’t want to pay a high rent. So the then-29-year-old freelance web designer took matters into his own hands and built a tiny house on an 8-by-20 flatbed trailer. In doing so he joined the tiny house movement — a growing group of people who live in houses around 200 square feet or less…”
Click here.
