Firelight
Ted Sterling describes how completing his woodstove brings him one step末construction-wise末closer to home.
A year ago at this time Sara and I were homeless. We had started construction on our house in July, planning to have something enclosed that we could inhabit for the rest of winter by the time we returned to DR from holiday travels.
Instead, it had become abundantly clear toward the end of autumn that we weren't going to make it, despite endless hard work and lots of helping hands. We had a roof and walls, but it was uninsulated and far from finished.
We'd lived in construction zones for a couple years prior and agreed we'd rather not move in until at least one room of two was in its finished state. What's more, we hadn't a stove or any other practical means of heating the house.
Our tent remained our home through most of December, down sleeping bags piled high as the temperatures dropped into the single digits and snow storms howled around our seemingly fragile existence. Only through the kindness of other Rabbits, who'd conveniently timed their respective journeys' arrivals and departures in sequence, were we able to cobble together continuous shelter for ourselves through the winter, as we house-sat no fewer than five structures.
After working as much as possible through the cold months, including trying to nail lathwork onto our upstairs walls at 2 degrees, we celebrated the return of Spring末albeit with snow still on the ground末by insulating the walls with blown cellulose. That meant the potential for warmth.
Unfortunately, potential does not actually keep one warm. When our final house-sit concluded at the end of April, our long-suffering tents, both of whose zippers had given up on proper function, became home once again. We both loved camping under our sheltering oak, but admitting the house still wasn't ready was humbling nonetheless.
One might have expected us to work on nothing but the house last year until it was thoroughly finished, but as you may have read in previous editions of the March Hare, we'd spent much of the winter working with Tamar on preparations for the birth of Ironweed. Therefore after working full-speed on our house through the beginning of June, summer found us focused almost entirely on our new cooperative garden and the building of Ironweed's cob and strawbale kitchen.
We were able to get enough work in on the house to finish our upstairs and move in a year to the day since we'd broken ground. In odd moments, we managed to accomplish a few critical projects like our earthen floor, porch, and greenhouse.
However, in the run-up to our departure for another round of winter holidays this past December, two major projects competed for our limited time: Ironweed kitchen's roof and our house's stove. The roof required several days of good weather in a row, and of that there was precious little in the whole of November.
So it was that I found myself on a rainy November 27, contemplating the downstairs front corner of my house: several buckets of cob, a pile of firebricks, and a number of steel stove components we'd had fabricated a year before. We'd designed the stove on paper more than a year before, but had no occasion to look at it againin the intervening months, so I felt a bit unprepared, to say the least.
It was the sort of project I might have dawdled indecisively on, if not for the prod of the falling temperatures in our house. After freezing nights, and days of no sun to heat it passively末I'd already lost all the warm-season garden refuges we'd dug up in hopes of finding a productive home for them in our greenhouse. Keeping that in mind, I settled down to work.
Within two hours of placing the first brick, I'd arrived at a compact design I was pleased with. Two days later, with both trepidation and excitement, we test-fired the stove, and read success in the speed-drying of the cob mortar.
It is difficult to adequately describe my emotions that afternoon, as Sara and I sat reading upstairs末in scant clothing, as it was 75 degrees末while thick snow blew past outside. We had taken numerous significant steps in the house along the way, but none were in the same league as having attained warmth in a house we'd conceived entirely in our imaginations and then built with our own hands.
Ted and Sara's passive solar house
It is a small house by most standards, at about 350 square feet including the greenhouse, but I have yet to live in it for a single day without an overwhelming sense of satisfaction at the way its intended function has followed from its design, and the simple but solid knowledge of having seen it personally through every minute stage. For the first time in my life I feel I have accomplished something tangible末something of obvious significance to my family and others, something that will stand for many years to come.
I am freshly affirmed in my commitment to Dancing Rabbit's experiment, and look upon the more than one dozen structures built on the land in these eight years with new appreciation. Building one's own shelter feels like a fundamental part of existence for all land-dwelling creatures, and I have finally accomplished this. I am no longer without a home.
Cob Cooking
Alyson Ewald honors the old in a time of welcoming the new.
Chad makes breakfast末If I were a gambler, I would bet Alyson is still in bed!
I grew up with wood heat in our Vermont home, but as a teenager I never cooked anything more elaborate than tea on our wood stove. The gas stove just seemed so much more convenient.
But here at Dancing Rabbit we're trying to do without fossil fuels, including propane, wherever possible. Also, with the summer heat we often have, nobody wants to be indoors cooking. It's so much nicer to be outdoors with a cool breeze and a prairie view. That's why many of us do our summer cooking over wood stoves in "outdoor kitchens". Chad and I went a little further, building and organizing our summer kitchen mainly around equipment and materials we could acquire from DR's rubbish piles.
Next to our sleeping shelter built from lumber and old roofing metal from a fallen-down barn, Chad threw together a rough but efficient kitchen from more of that salvaged lumber, plus an old sink and a few tarps. Then, with bricks we gathered in a vacant lot in Kirksville, he sculpted a foundation for the stove and experimented with different arrangements of the firebox and cooking surface. For mortar he used cob末a mixture of local clay and sand末some of which would be fired hard by the heat of the stove, but most of which he was able to rehydrate and reuse on the next stove incarnation.
In its final design, the stove stood about the same height as a regular cooking stove. The firebox was directly beneath the sheet-metal cooking surface, which Chad had hammered flat from a piece of ridged roofing metal. Then the fire snaked around beneath our "hot-water heater," a stainless-steel cooking pot nestling into the cob, with a spigot attached to the side of it.
When we wanted to do dishes, we would simply run some of this water into a plastic bucket that also had a spigot attached to its side. We'd set that bucket behind the sink, turn the tap, and voila: the first running hot water at DR. (OK, technically I guess it's "walking" hot water.)
Alternatively, by moving a couple of bricks, we could redirect much of the fire instead to go under and around a different pot Chad cobbed in next to the firebox. This was our canner, which would boil water quite quickly, and in which we canned tomatoes all summer long. After going beneath these pots, what heat was left made its way up a stovepipe and away from the cooking area.
After a few weeks of using this stove we began to think about all the heat stored in the bricks and cob after the stove had been run for a while. We realized we could use the firebox as an oven after all the wood had burned down. This seemed to work even better if we ran the stove with several extra bricks lying on top of the cooking surface for a while before baking. We successfully baked bread and roasted red peppers in the "oven" this way.
Alyson enjoys the luxury of cooking outdoors during the warmer months
Now we're indoors for the winter, and still cooking on a wood stove: an old St. Clair wood-burning cast iron cookstove made in a foundry in Belleville, IL, once known as the "stove capital of the world." We sit on the couch next to the stove on these cold winter mornings, warming our toes by the same source that also boils the water for our tea, keeps a pot of hot water ready to do dishes or laundry, and heats the pans that fry our sourdough toast. As we spread the toast with blackberry preserves, we think of last summer's stove that cooked the preserves and daydream about next summer's outdoor kitchen. I can't wait to see what we dream up.
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