I’ve had my wee LED headlight on and assisted by the full moon I’ve been bracing in the walls of the Wash-House to put something solid under the roof that Trevor and Richard put up last Friday. The forecast said rain and winds from North turning East turning SouthWest to Southerly so I was pleased the south wall was all rugged up in iron too, as I added bits of timber to each of the other three walls, in turns.
It was so helpful of mother nature to give us such a slow moving anti-cyclone that I got as far as I did before the cold, wild winds of the south embraced the clearing. Able to work up until 11am on the 21st of May my final act was to nail and staple a 2.8m wide and 3.2m tarp over the whole west wall to keep out the coming rain. That rain is outside now, enabling me to write this, while it waters all my fruit and veg for me!
I’d love to show you a picture of the roof but my camera phone is away again seeing if they can actually get it to download its photos, so you will have to trust me that when all the purlins were in place, standing back from the low end, and looking along the middle roof line, there was a magnificent part helix, a bit of spiral, with a dash of twist in the roof.
With the iron on the twist is subtly hidden, and what becomes visible is a roof that aspires to the trees. It starts almost level at its south end and rising more steeply on the east and more sedately on the west, so that the north end slopes up from west to east, its highest point is the north-east tip tucked under Tree Fuchsia. It curves down and out like the canopies of the trees it snuggles up with.
Facing down into all the prevailing winds in this way, the roof will be pushed down onto its footings, by the strong winds we do get, for a good roof, always takes the wind in its stride.
With the iron on I realised why the inner nudges kept saying “Stone”, while I kept saying (to myself) “Are You Sure?”, “Stone is quite a light colour”, “What will it look like – maybe I should call in and see a whole sheet of it”. Standing back and looking at both the roof and the south wall in “Stone”, I saw it. I had forgotten that the big one metre cuboidal object I am going to put the handbasin on, is a stone. Standing back I could see the roof, I could see the south wall, and I could see them echoed in that large stone and in the pale sycamore poles that hold up that outer part of the building. I also saw how having the iron on that south wall visually defines the semi-outdoor hand-basin and shower as a separate utility. A service outside of the roof and walls of the wash-house proper.
From the shower and hand-basin you walk to a separate entrance to enter the Wash-House. Indeed they share a wall, but indeed they are separate as the “Stone” indicates.
And why pick “Stone”?
“Stone” colour is also reflected in the lighter aspects of the Tree Fuchsia bark and in the underside of their leaves.
I don’t know how many more warped roofs I will build. It took weeks longer to cut all four sides at each end of every piece of timber in the roof at different angles in order to block in the whole roof. So much effort that I was not always a happy chappy, or chippy, as we sometimes call our carpenters, even though I loved the inspiration and guidance that lead me to do it.
More on the Building of the Wash-House as a dynamic, eco-building, design process is written at “Forest Gardening meets Deep and Spiritual Ecology“
[...] been building a wash-house which you can read about in the Harmony Farm Newsletter. The exciting pertinent point here is that in order to get more time building it, my inner nudges, [...]