Barrel Ovens

I've done a fair amount of cooking on campfires in the past, when Kyle and I were very involved with the local historical re-enactment society, with smoke stinging my eyes and my hair all in the way. It's always a bit of a bother, and nothing ever seems clean. Given that we'll likely be camping for the month or two of building the little 'prototype' house, and will be inviting a lot of people to help, I wasn't particularly looking forward to the prospect of cooking for 20-30 people for any length of time. I've done it before, but it's not fun.

So I started looking for alternatives, as you do. Wood fired ovens came up over and over again, partly as they seem one of the few things that enjoy popularity with both off-grid eco-enthusiasts such as ourselves and the more 'regular' love-to-watch-Better-Homes-and-Gardens type people. Everyone seems to want one. But, again, they seemed like a fair amount of bother.

Then I found barrel ovens. No 3-4 hours of stoking the fire in advance, but similar efficiency. Seems like a no-brainer.

Kits for the metalwork can be ordered in the US through a company delightfully called Firespeaking, but even if they would ship to Australia I suspect the postage would be prohibitive, so we will need to make this ourselves. At this stage Kyle pointedly reminds me that I had said he could one day buy a welder, and perhaps that day has come. Seems like this will work out well.

In my head at least it makes good sense to begin the metal work for the barrel oven anytime from now, then begin building the brickwork as soon as we purchase land as we don't need permits for this type of thing. Old fired bricks are dirt cheap at the local tip-shop - we go every weekend and they always have stacks of them around. By the time we get around to having permits for the house and having all those people around the oven will have dried, been test-fired, and be ready to go!

"But earth houses always look so... hippy..."

Before deciding that we wanted to build an earthbag house we did considerable research on this style of building, research that continues. Even now, every so often I find new things.

Whilst Kyle and his ex-painter/decorator eyes has always been more actively concerned with the appearance of our intended house than I have, we've both always loved the look typical of so many earthen houses.

We love the curves that are so restful to the eye, we love the abundance of greenery, and the colours that you couldn't quite get away with in a 'normal' house. I guess if we wanted 'normal' we wouldn't be doing this anyway, so it's unsurprising the different appearance is part of the attraction.

A little while ago I found the below collection from somewhere near Bogata in Columbia, all designed by the same architect.

I'd never seen earthbag houses with such clean, crisp lines or such bright colours. Very schnazzy.

And the light, bright interiors:

I'd always previously sort of assumed that the kind of people who build earthen homes would tend to be the kind of people who decorate them in loud and colourful ways, as we intend to do, simply because we like it. When I saw these pictures it seemed fair all of a sudden, having never considered it before, that some people would want the earthen house but a more conventional interior appearance.

Sometimes when our project comes up in conversation people ask what it will look like, and I show them random offerings from my Pinterest collection. Upon showing these to a friend she seemed amazed - apparently it had never occurred to her that it was possible to decorate an earthen house with crisp lines and white walls and a marbled benchtop in the kitchen. For some reason it had seemed to her that it simply wasn't allowed, through some weird nuance of the laws of physics, to decorate them in any other way than the slightly 'hippy' images I had favoured before.

Building our skills

In a rather long and convoluted story, Kyle has recently commenced some woodworking courses having had an interest for quite a while. As part of one of these courses he was required to make a coffee table with two drawers (I'm not entirely sure why it had to have that specific quality, but I'm sure there was some reason). So one day he began a discussion along the lines of "what type of coffee table do you want". We discussed many factors, from the positioning of said drawers to what we we would put in the space underneath, to what type of wood it would be made from, and then to the all important colour. Kyle, you see, used to be a painter/decorator and has rather an eye for these things.

After a long search for an appropriate green, and some considerable experimentation with steel wool and vinegar, he had a lot of fun one afternoon watching it all come together.

I often end up discussing our housing project with people at work, usually just in passing. They're all very curious, but sometimes it can be difficult to convince everyone we meet that we can actually go through with this and end up with a space we can live in comfortably. This has always been something I've tended to take for granted - why on earth couldn't we do it? But the more I talk to people about it the more I realise that that attitude is entirely a result of my upbringing (thanks, Mum and Dad, you can say "I told you so" about now and feel well chuffed).

Kyle doesn't always share this blind faith in our abilities, but I'm confident (wouldn't I be?) that he'll come around. It seems so obvious to me that all this is possible and within our grasp. After all, between us we have so many skills, like woodworking, that will help us in that journey.

Even our cat, Plop, thought it was pretty cool when done.