I finished parts of my shower using a moroccan lime plaster technique called tadelakt تادآلاكت which involves introducing olive oil soap into the final layer and burnishing it with a polished stone to create a really smooth finish that you just want to keep touching. i learned the basics last year from the excellent Ryan Chivers of Artesano Plasters in Colorado, and finally got around to doing my first piece here. We had problems with the lime base coat as the shower had been in use and possibly already become waterproofed through soap suds, and thus we had a very slow dry time and vastly differing set-up time from top to bottom of the walls. as it took a lot longer than i thought it couldn’t be completed over a weekend so the timing was a bit off and hard to give the burnishing as much loving as it deserved but it still managed to be a fairly decent first effort. i chose to have a white plaster as i already have a few colours in the bathroom and didn’t want to add more but in hindsight i think i would have tried to match the pale green in the concrete floor. i used dolomite sand for the mixture, it’s local and is already graded, washed and bagged so it sounds ideal, but again, in hindsight, having a darker sand would have allowed small grains to show through the surface and added more visual texture to the finish. great learning experience.
i used a single piece of birch with a live edge to create the top row of drawer fronts that includes a false front underneath the sink, and wraps around a corner and continues on the far side of the stove. finished with a couple of coats of tung oil, and sanded with a 600 grit paper, it has a lustrous glow to it and a silky smooth finish that i am really happy with. i hadn’t used tung oil before and i like it, especially for a hardwood like birch or maple, which are the two local hard woods that are fairly easy to come by.
kept things pretty simple for the big guys, dark brown colour, pre-cast and ground and then installed. i have had much better results with pre-casting, for some reason the melamine surface gives a creamy finish that is much easier to grind out, and i am much more comfortable taking my time with the carpentry on the form work than trowelling the surface in place. only drawback is it limits the size of the pieces i can make, as i work on my own and would have a hard time moving them . this is done in two pieces, each weighing about 120kg. i outsmarted it with some wheels and levers, and didn’t damage anything.
A set of three large drawers underneath the day bed. the drawer fronts are made of a single piece of live-edge douglas fir finished with coat of shellac. I’ve been using lots of shellac for the interior finishing, especially on fir and hemlock as it gives a really nice deep reddy orange colour that works wonderfully with the redness in doug fir. Not only is it really beautiful, dries really quickly and uses alcohol as the solvent, it’s made by motherfucking beetles. yup. female lac beetles in india secrete this stuff by the shedload over trees and it is collected and used as wood finish. it’s use goes back thousands of years and for record nerds it was what 78s were made out of pre world war 2. The handles are made out of bits of drill steel that I found on nearby Mt. Brennan. Brennan must have been some Irish guy, probably some cunt from Kilkenny, back in the boom days of the 1890’s. Totally guessing that part, but there was a huge and short-lived mining boom here as large easily accessible deposits of silver lead and zinc were discovered and exploited. Anyways, Mt. Brennan is huge, 2900m high and there are the remnants of a few mines scattered on it with the associated debris, and these 1" square solid steel bars were used as drill steel. back when men were men and did such things as drag woodstoves 2000 metres up a mountain to scratch in the dirt for a living, these bars were held in place by one guy and beaten to fuck with a sledgehammer by another one, slowly drilling into the rock until the mountain cracked open, gold fell out and the lads could go to Sandon and ride prostitutes for a few weeks until the money was all gone and they had to go up the mountain again. I think they kind of look like fossilized hip bones or something.
I need an award for this. The picture does not begin to describe how fucking wonderful this thing I have made. I have terrible self-confidence and am the last person in the world to tell the world about my greatness, but this is beautiful. Possibly the best thing I have ever made. A two-piece concrete countertop with dovetail joint wrapped around a doug fir timber with two smaller matching shelves below. clay plaster on right, birch cabinetry on left.
i am happy.
i haven’t had any time for my own house this summer so instead here are some pictures of a covered deck i’ve built down the valley in Winlaw. horse-logged rough-cut timbers for the main frame, varying widths of cedar decking, japanese-style timber-frame section on the front including live-edge beam and rock-scribed posts, cascading roof pattern, white square-cut rafter ends.
every tool is a hammer. except screwdrivers, which are chisels.
shingles on the outside of the bathroom took forever to do and ate up loads of material but it was probably worth the hassle at least, if not the expense. pattern wraps around two sides and contains a diamond pattern in the centre of one wall.
finally got around to waxing my bathroom floor which is a poured concrete terrazzo style thinger, three colours in the shape of a ¼ nautical star which is hard to see unless you look at it IRL and have someone point it out. not as dark as i had hoped and my screeding job leaves much to be desired, but the waxing somehow made it look old, in a good way, like thousands of feet have travelled over it. real terrazzo would involve broadcasting marble chips into the fresh concrete so i’m a little reluctant about calling it that but it’s pretty close.
updated photos of the back door. i’ve somehow acquired some taste when it comes to choosing colours, something i’ve long been terrible at. the blue door is the same as the metal roofing on top and picks up the blue hue in the main green walls. also got the ends of the rafters painted white, japanese style, which looks really fucken sharp if i do say so myself. no poxy fascia boards to deal with either.