Check out what we discovered on our wall!!!!! I gather that it's common to find sprouts on natural clay walls, and in fact the crew was surprised there weren't more growing with all the straw, but there was just this one!!!!! Apparently you watch the sprout and once it has died, you know your base layer is dry and it's time to add the final coat:-)

I guess you know your house is all-natural when the plant life is thriving like this!!!!!!!!

Splashes of colour on our end walls......looks amazing when the sun is shining through:-)

A couple more shots of the work in progress, a teaser of sorts! But you KNEW Jamie had to incorporate his vast collection of coloured ductape into the house in one way or another!!!!!!!!!!

A few glimpses into how our future pantry is shaping up. This is the one room that we decided to just do a thick base coat of plaster, with the straw in it, and leave it at that. It looks really neat to see bits of straw, and it's a room that works with the more rustic look. The other walls have just a clay/sand thin coat on them which has a much more polished look.

The idea in the pantry is to sand these braces up, and then add live-edge shelves milled from the trees on our property. I can't wait to see it all set up, with jars and jars of canned goods lining them!!!!!!

A few more photos of the wall that Jamie and I mudded all by ourselves, with a wee bit of help from Ryland to 'scratch' it at the end. I think I'll leave the final coat for the experts, that's much finickier work, but it feels good to have helped create a few of the walls in the house!!!!!

A few more shots of the house coming together - with mud, clay, water mixed with straw as a binder!!!!!



Once the lath is sprayed with the clay slip, a thick layer of the mud is smeared onto the walls. First off, you need to put a thin layer on and press hard to make sure it keys into the lath (essentially, presses in between the big cracks). Once a small area is done with that layer, than you add more mud until it's up to an inch thick on the lower levels of the wall, and thinner as you go up. Once this mud is smooth, you add scratch marks with a big comb, which makes it easier for the final, thinner layer to attach to the mud.

Here's a few shots of the kids learning the process - they enjoyed a short stint of mud plastering, but then got bored and wandered off!!!!!



Unfortunately, Tina doesn't have the same option, so here she is working on one of the tall walls. Tina works with Camel's Back Straw Bale Construction, and she was here for the baling last fall, and we always look forward to her return. I'm going to be pretty sad to see her go, though it also means that we'll be able to move back in - a bitter sweet moment!

I've finally started to download our thousands of photos off the camera from the past couple of weeks, and thought that since I don't seem to have the time these days to do any serious posting, I'll try to give you little glimpses of what's been going on around here. So first off, check out the view from the massive pile of sand in our driveway (needed for the natural plaster on our walls) - there's a new house going up very quickly down the driveway! So exciting, and very neat to get a chance to watch it all again without the stress of it being our own!!!!



And inside our own house, we've called in the ghostbusters:-) Te he. This crazy contraption Andrew is wearing has been spraying all of the lath with a clay slip, which makes it easier for the base coat to stick to the wood. Having slipped my way down his pile of clay and water outside, I know full well why it's called a slip!!!!!! Good times.....and more photos to come:-)