Chapter 64 Deciding to Stay Through the Winter - from my book Changes

Apr 19

Chapter 64

Deciding to Stay Through the Winter

During the second summer of creating this glorious and primitive little shelter, which my sister called a mansion compared to her smaller cob structure, I decided I wanted to stay through the winter. Consequently we went to work with gusto to try to get the place ready for cold weather.

My son Marshal has some friends that helped us make cob and place it, and we had a day of cooperative cobbing on that kitchen and stairs.

When we couldn’t get enough urbanite for what we needed, we would purchase cinder blocks and use them instead. I wanted to see if we could mix and match the urbanite, cinder blocks, and actual rocks as we built the retaining walls and the foundations for the cob walls. The look is haphazard, but that was part of the fun of the experiment. I was curious to see if the haphazard nature in the placement of the materials would be as strong as otherwise. It appears that as long as we used plenty of mortar to glue it all together, the structure was strong enough for the size of the structure we were building.

We built a cob wall to close the kitchen off from the outdoors; a wall of windows and doors for the tall, front facing wall; but for all the other walls, we attached heavy duty tarps to act as wind breakers. To insulate, we purchased lots of thrift store blankets, and gathered more from my parents house where they had been hoarding them for whoever needed them. The blankets were hung up indoors, along the tarped walls.

The rafters in the roof had big gaps between them where they met the top of the walls. We spent a day stuffing garbage bags with wadded up newspapers, then stuffing the filled bags into the gaps between the rafters. The kids from the Sanger family, a family we knew from church, came over that day and helped us stuff those bags.

I also purchased a little, wood burning heat stove to use when the weather was cold. That, along with an earth oven we built in the kitchen, was the way we would heat the house.

I registered the kids in the little country school down the road, and every morning I drove them to school through the early morning fog.

They rode the bus home at the end of the day, and I met them at the bottom of the Bureau of Land Management road that led to our property.

We found that it got colder than we expected in the Snail Shell House so we used blankets to section off a small area around the little wood stove.

There wasn’t much daylight during the colder months and we all went to bed very early. We had candles around the house to give us enough light to move around, but not really enough light to do much else.

Near Christmas time, my husband came to stay with us in the woods, as he frequently did, and talked me into coming home to Florida for the holidays. I agreed and we all took the southern route across the country, back to Florida, for Christmas.

As you might imagine, my husband then talked us into staying in Florida for the rest of the winter. That ended our staying through the winter, and prompted me to want to build a smaller cozy spiral shaped house for wintering in, which we ended up building during future summers, where the Wikki Tikki was.

As an epilogue to that summer’s winter preparations:

When we went back to the property the following summer, we had to clear out all those stuffed garbage bags from the rafters because the rats and mice had turned them into high classed condos with a view. Also, the raised wood floor we put in the middle level of the Snail Shell House became a special, warm and protected space for rats to build their nests.

My niece Rachel was there with us and she vigorously pulled the floor apart and dismantled the rats nest, finding all sorts of things besides sticks and leaves. For example, that is where all our missing candles went, and hair brushes, pencils, pens, small books, and combs, along with many other household items they could drag into their little abode. We all had to laugh about the things they gathered, and at the lesson we learned about building in the woods. Get rid of the empty spaces that the rats will take advantage of.