Put the mother of all eggs in to a basket

Few days back a friend came over bringing this with him; any idea what it is ? :)

Well of course a giant 18 liter ceramic water egg! 

I got an assignement to make bases for ten of these so this is the story of the prototype.

First of we made a mould from an (half-a-century) old newspapers and tapestry glue.

Then the first models,

And with little adjustement it seems to work out allright!

   Then the same process with hickory board 

and the egglet

.

 

After this the base,

 attached with 100mm screws to pre-drilled holes, no glue needed for this one.

Lo and behold! This egg has more water in it you drink in a week! ;)

Here comes the sun - kitchen talk

This is the story of the making the kitchen for our new place, from the floor upwards.

 So first off we started with taking off these plates and plastering revealing the gorgeous red brick wall underneath, good theme for a kitchen.

 I dissambled this fifties kitchen from a block house in Helsinki to have enough pieces to re-create a retro one.

Then the sink cabinet was piled around the pipes and the floor was painted up.
Almost all of the cabinets got a new plinth and a leveling above to meet the hights of modern standards.

The table tops were finely cut to meet the eclectic walls.

 And then attached firmly to the base (though leaving the leeway for the wood to live their own life).
 

The table slabs got elastic joints and the food closet was restored in to its old place, with good insulations the floor heating going around it though, so it could  be turned to a traditional cool cabinet by drilling ventilation to the outer wall.

Then we had a bee to paint all the closets with new surfaces, bright yellow and white!

Cabinets attached to the walls aaand...

we even got power!  No rush finishing this with battens.

And a lot of light with all these old windows.

Mattress Making

This is a post of making a baby size futon bed!

The story starts from here. Our one-and-a-half-year-old wanted her own bed, since her cousin happened to have one and we found this for her from the nearby recycle center.

Since we have always been sleeping on a futon family bed AND we happened to have this wreck of a hemp futon upstears for my furniture work I decided to make the mattress with her out of this.

So first we cut a lot of slices of coconut fiber and hemp and stacked them up.

We added the cotton sheets in bedween to make it fluffy.

Then I sew a bag with a zipper out of the remnants of the bed and we added little more cotton to the top and the bottom.

Then with a lot of squeezing all of it got in and...

 ...first the mattress looked like this.

 And after evening it out - gorilla style - we sew the original felt buttons on place with a huge needle to hold it firm.

 This is how it came up.

A sweet place to dream!

Floor heating system

We bought this awesome old house from Asola near Helsinki and since it needs some serious renovation, I will make a series of blog posts about it!

Under the plastic carpet of the kitchen we found this lovely wooden floor.

And since it was squeaking and bending we decided to undo it and stack it again with a floor heating pipes under it, since a ground-source heat pump system be installed later.

 The woodchip insulation was in good condition, so I got the plumming fixed for the kitchen, pulled the electric wires under the carrier beams and evened it out adding some pulp slabs for insulation.

Then off I went one morning to this surrealistic junkyard to see if I would find something usefull for the floor heating system.

And SCORE! I found what I came looking for after hiking the mountains of aluminium.
Right there in the front middle of the picture, almost a hundred kilo roll of unused 0,5mm thick aluminium, perfect for the floor!

Why..?


Because these are sold for the same purpose aprox 8€ a piece, and that would be thousands of euros for the whole house.

So I took the time and with the sleight of the hand got the sheets ready for the heat pipes.
At times it was like wrestling with huge aluminium snake with sharp edges.

Then we put the pipes in place holding them down with planks until the floor boards came to rescue.

Everything went well, though I had to cut three new pieces for the end since it is now tighter and few boards had to be changed.

After the rest of the kitchen is made, this will be painted and warmed up for the feet :)

Dry-toilet-revolution

So here's some finnish dry-toilet culture for a change!

 This is Ekolet, a finnish invention and the only dry toilet on the market (that I know of) that composts urine at the same time as doodoo.

I had the privilege of installing it to cellar of a big farm house and here's the story about it!

Here is how it works;

It has four separate chambers, like pieces of a pie, except there is empty squeare space of 20cm in the middle.

Everything from the toilets comes down te crap pipes(the brown pipe high in the picture, behind it there is another black one), the poo stays in a chamber and the pee goes trough to the very bottom from where it goes in to a pump(in the front right) and circulates to the top where it drips trough plastic membranes with bacteria coat on them, and the pee changes its form so it stops smelling and becomes a ready fertilizer.

Every year the whole machine is turned quarter cycle, and in four years there is ready super soil to empty for the garden!

A ventilation pipe goes all the way to the roof and a small fan keeps underpreassure in the tanks to take out the possible smell, though when the fermenting gets going there is not much of it.

This is the first floor toilet from inside.

And from te outside.

The second floors toilet,

and heres the seat.
It's hard to see, but this tube goes straight down about 6 meter before the chamber!
With a good flashlight, you can watch the free fall! ;)