Building with Nature (Hobbit House)

[Music] get rugged is a scottish charity passionate about encouraging more people to self-build what we're aiming to do is to inspire people to take back control of their housing needs and create a home of their own use an all-natural materials sourced from their local environment and the project that we're doing we're doing it with heartwind and we've created a pop-up learning village of students from all over the world they've all came together some have got absolutely no experience at all of self-building and they're done they've started this from nothing and now as you'll see we've built a house i've seen natural builds and natural buildings it's just a real softness and uh like an organic sense like the same thing i feel when i'm out in the woods or on the mountains like this it's more gentle so so excited i knew right away this was exactly what i wanted to do this was everything i wanted in one big package [Music] a lot of the techniques we're using in this build and all our builds are traditional heritage building techniques there's been lots of clever development over many hundreds of years using materials found in the area local to where you're building to build good quality homes it's taking us back to what we used to do using lime in a stone foundation clay plastering cob building these are all techniques that have been used for you know hundreds if not thousands of years in the uk i mean it's sort of whenever you're trying to knit round with square is quite challenging uh boulders and things like that things that are inherently not square and then you try to you know match and meet those with things that are square sawn timber and and such um that is always quite a head scratcher but not necessarily always in a bad way it's it's always really fun to try and problem solve and and figure out those things you know good design we think should you work with um a small number of materials that are ideally locally sourced and then can be sort of crafted or worked by hand and with minimal of impact we're trying to build with local materials using timbers from uh you know the neighboring estates locally milled here we're trying to build truly vernacular buildings that are actually part of their landscape because they are made of the landscape we've got proven track records of buildings that have stood for hundreds of years so we know very well that those materials and techniques work so the way we work is we try and combine modern building science and understanding of of how buildings need to perform with these heritage techniques and materials the wisdom of for the industrial revolution or before we were using these things so intensively is we could still draw on that and we can bring in technologies that are new putting on the rafters we were working in big teams so really quite heavy bits of wood and also quite awkward because the length so and we had a scaffold uh and also geoffrey was up the top in the inner henge and we had a team that were actually passing the uh rafters up through the posts and then we had to fit boards of douglas fir sort of to cover each step so almost uh to create a ladder in between two rafters so as a block so then we could put the pond liner and then the turf on so nothing will come through then also so it looks nice if you're looking up you've got this pattern of all these lines going in getting up on the roof for the first time was pretty was pretty amazing you spend such a lot of time in the ground and then building the frame and then when you finally clamber up a ladder and up onto the roof uh and you you realize that you're up in the sky and you're sat on something that didn't exist until a few weeks ago i think that's pretty cool as well below our feet is an earth floor that starts with a big fat layer of glaipor insulation which is a it's recycled car windscreens that's put through a furnace and puffed up kind of like a crunchy bar this is a fantastic use of the material because it creates a free draining foundation that is really insulating on top of that we've put our underfloor heating pipes um that will allow us to heat up the all the thermal mass that's in our earth floor and then on top of the pipes goes 150 mil of base pour we call it the lower level so that's building up a big chunk of thermal mass we in this build have done that using a ram dearth technique so that is kind of a dry mix that we've tamped down we've used people power so we had a big dance party on top of the floor to compact it all down it was a lot of [Music] fun [Music] the favorite part of the build for me has definitely been the straw bale section and i really appreciate the material itself it's a very interesting material to use for each straw bale it was individually manipulated cut shaved moved chopped down re-tightened and put in place specifically for each part of the wall so no one bale was the same what we had to do before we fitted the strawberries onto the ladder or between the ladder sections was to get some wooden stakes which we foraged from nearby trees we took them back to site we then um axed them into spikes they were then placed into the ladder all around the ladder around the building for the straw bales to then be placed onto in order to keep the straw bales in place what is yeah immensely empowering about this whole process is the fact that you can you can build your own house but a lot of it is not that complicated you know if you if you you watch somebody else who has the skills do it and then you realize that i see it it's a thing that you can do yourself i think i think what's difficult is that actually uh building in this way requires a lot of people it requires a lot of teamwork and that in itself is brilliant because it it brings you together as a community it's so easy to get caught up in say filling in the wall with clay and just it's like it's not a satisfying process just there's no end result you're just sort of jabbing in and jabbing in and it's just really easy to get frustrated because it takes hours and you hurt your hands but to actually go oh yeah if i don't do this i can't do the next step we're all learning and none of us have really done people come at different levels of experience but none of us have done this before this level of detail and the amount of different techniques every day we've done a different thing at talking to all the other students about you know favorite task and favourite job and favorite skill we've learned so much in just a month [Music] it seemed like it could be a bit overwhelming at first like how the heck do you start building a house but actually if you just break it down and you work on each section sequentially get that complete and then you can move on i think that's a really big part i found useful specific skills like carpentry skills and use of different saws especially like i didn't have a lot of knowledge of using different types of saws different types of tools and so yeah learning each tool how it's used and getting efficient with it really enjoyed that and that's something i'll take forward i've really grown in confidence so they've been every kind of week you get new challenges that are things completely completely new to you and initially they kind of seem daunting we think i'm not going to do that or i'm going to have to get someone else to help me and as the bill goes on you kind of realize more and more that you can do things you didn't think you're going to be able to so it's quite a quite a general confidence boost [Music] [Music] step by step we go through the build all the while gradually increasing skill and competence and as you get towards the end of the build your competence and skills increased when you start to do the finer detail work you've already had quite an immersive experience and improved your skill and then you get to the end and you've built an entire house the minute i got here i just knew that it was so right and it was the right [Music] decision i feel like i've learned so much that i can't even comprehend how much has actually gone in i feel like i'm gonna need to sit down for a really long time just to process and think wow i've actually been part of building a house how incredible is that what's been really really wonderful about this whole experience is realising that there's a whole gang of us out there who are striving towards the same kind of things everybody here has come from completely different backgrounds some of us had no building experience before some with little bits every day we've picked up a new skill we've learned a new technique or about a new technology and we've all we've done it we've mixed lime and we've used chisels to make smooth cuts and the skills progress so quickly [Music] you

Channel: Hideaway Under the Stars

Views: 97,861

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Id: n_y9Wi-tiG0

Length: 12min 11sec (731 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 02 2021