Tori is a shellfish biologist with no prior building experience. After falling in love with tiny homes and doing in-depth research, she built a modern farmhouse-style tiny house. As she puts it, her tiny home build was “powered by significant amounts of tequila and inspired by Joanna Gaines” of Fixer Upper fame. But it was … Read more
Old churches offer both spiritual and historic value. I’ve visited several in the American Southwest that are worth commenting about. The first is the San Francisco de Asis Church in Taos, New Mexico, which was started by the Franciscans in the late 1700s and completed in 1816. This adobe building is now a National Historic … Read more
The City of Cape Town, South Africa is using recycled materials to construct a new multipurpose center at the Helderberg Nature Reserve. The center, due to be completed by June 2021, has a horse-shoe shape and faces the Helderberg mountain. The Helderberg Nature Reserve will provide benefits include education, recreation, tourism, job creation and skills … Read more
www.firespeaking.com has a whole page devoted to mass heaters combined with staircases, which seems like a great idea to me. Both mass heaters and staircases take up quite a bit of floor space, so if you combine them into a unified structure they conserve space and add a lot of interest to the room. Below … Read more
The Mishings, a tribal community of Assam, India, are a rare group that has escaped the stifling economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. “We didn’t feel the economic pressures,” says Pabitra Mili. What came to the community’s rescue is the revival of an ancient food-forest practice generally known as agroforestry, where trees, shrubs, herbs and … Read more
The reason I am posting this at the Natural Building Blog is that the old abandoned school that this couple visited is still standing so proudly. It is a perfect example of how well built stone masonry can withstand the ravages of time. The story written below was penned by Daryl Austin about a wonderful … Read more