We’re starting to build the Common House with the School of Natural Building (SNaB)!
If you haven’t seen the other post on this here, it’s the communal space I designed with Common Practice for Bridport Cohousing.
The Common House has been designed with tyre foundations, straw bale walls, clay render on the inside and lime render on the outside… All processes and materials that SNaB build and run workshops on.
We were lucky to have Babara Jones herself running this workshop showing the Bridport Cohousing Community and people on the course how to build the foundations.
The site isn’t flat. So there was a process of establishing the lowest and highest points on the site. For the highest point, we would be putting the tyres pretty low in the ground. For the lowest point, we would have to stack three tyres! These aren’t your usual tyres, these are old F1 tyres brought in from a local-ish race track.
The positions of the foundations are set out in the field and the final level for the tyres is marked on a post at the location.
We dig down far enough that the top of the tyre is at the level we want and then dig an extra 50mm further.
Once we have a level base we fill it with 50mm of gravel to bring the tyre back up to where we want it.
The tyre is placed and then we fill it with pea shingle which we compact as we pour.
In some cases instead of burying a whole tyre to build the level up, we just use MOT to raise the level.
I think you never fully appreciate how many people and how many hours it will take to get them all made.
If you haven’t heard of the School of Natural Building (SNaB) or read Barbara Jones’ book ‘Building with Straw Bales’, then I highly suggest you do!
