This challenging little hands-on project we built on our property, one that we came back to work on every now and then between dry stone jobs, was actually completed just yesterday, and deserves showcasing here. The short slideshow video documents the various stages of this hare-brained idea of mine, from its inception to final execution.
This was an dream I have had for some time now, after having completed a dry stone sauna for some clients, teaching two 'blackhouse' workshops up in Holstein Ontario, doing another black house at our 2009 Roctoberfest, building a French dry stone cabanne in 2008, a stone boat house at another festival, a dry stone cladding of an ugly concrete icehouse, and of course the small 'sentry box' we built as a dry stone demonstration at the green fair in Port Hope, which is shown as the opening slide of this video.
Having built these things on other people's places and loving how yummy they looked, I really really wanted to have a dry stone hut on my own property, and more importantly I also wanted to get rid of the flimsy Canadian Tire shed that was handed down to us by some kind neighbours when we first moved to Port Hope, which though it was useful initially for storage, always seemed to spoil any photos we took over the years of the walls and gardens we had created around the house.
So killing two birds with a lot of stones, (actually no birds were killed in the making of this hut, maybe some slugs and worms and small trees), I decided to 'clad' the annoyingly ugly tin building in order to have our very own dry stone toolshed right on our own property. Everyone should have one.
Im seriously thinking about living in it.
