technē and poiēsis

Falu Rödfärg- Swedish red paint, made of flour, linseed oil, and iron oxide. From the very beginning, I dreamed of this red colour for the walls of the Carabane. Getting the paint proved to be a difficult mission, since I had it delivered to a friend's place in France just before the borders closed due to the epidemic. To bring it back, I crossed into France at an unguarded gravel road border with my bike, biked the last 4km, put the 25kg of paint into my backpack and then biked back into Switzerland! It felt very adventurous. I was very happy to put the wood cladding up. The Carabane had stayed too long with just a rainscreen. Here's how I made the boards fit the curve of the roof. I tried different techniques but this one gave the most satisfactory result. 1. Trace the outline of the roof on the back of the board  2. Offset the trace by 2 cm (because I wanted a 2cm ventilation gap between the roof and the boards) 3. Score with a knife (to reduce spli...

It pays to have a design and to stick to it. Way back in January, I had started the kitchen. I found the stainless-steel countertop second-hand. The carpenter who was selling it offered to cut it for me. So I had the countertop before any other part of the house!  And I also started building the kitchen cabinets before I even started the walls of the caravan. And then, beginning of April, I brought the assembly inside...and it fit. To the millimetre. That's one thing I am pretty proud of. That means that my construction is conform to the plans I drew... The countertop came with the old plumbing and faucet. I was able to hook up the old faucet to a foot pump that is connected to a 25l jug. That's my water supply. I thought it would be complicated to make the different pipes fit together, but it turns out I just needed to slide one onto the other: The drain is routed out through the floor of the caravan. I'm going to use a planter as a ...