I had a rare and wonderful experience at Yestermorrow: I learned a lot, from kind and knowledgeable teachers, alongside interesting and dedicated students. The campus is surrounded and infused with Vermont’s natural beauty, and filled with thoughtful architecture. It was inspiring to be in a place that had been designed and constructed with such obvious care and creativity, and I was delighted by the incorporation of nature/natural materials, and all of the unique architectural expressions to be found on campus.
The main campus building, capped by (what I learned is called) a monitor roof. 
Outdoor solar shower with a zipper closure? Why not! 
A dry stacked (meaning no mortar was used) stone structure on campus. 
A student housing cabin on campus, with a slate roof. 
Another student housing cabin, with a straw bale foundation. 
My home for 3 weeks. I arrived first, and therefore got to claim this prime (i.e. protected from the rain) tent spot. 
This campus path was lined with fruiting raspberry vines, which provided tasty afternoon sancks. 
A wall in the Aspen dorm room.
I helped build a whole tiny house! This included several construction firsts: using a nail gun, marking layout and hammering joists together, installing a window, rolling out bituthene and screwing on roofing panels.
Checking that the floor joists on top of the trailer are square. 
Constructing a stud bay for the passenger side wall. 
Nailing exterior sheathing to the stud bay. 
Is reality matching up with the plan? 
Lifting… 
Still lifting… 
Lifted! The wall is ready to be braced in place. 
Cutting rough openings for the windows. 
Walls are up, window openings are cut! 
Hanging roof joists. 
Adding sheathing to the roof. 
Can’t roll bituthene on a dirty roof! 
Ready to roll. 
Adding roof flashing and wall strapping. 
Panel roofing installed. 
Abby (the tiny house’s owner) helping to adjust a too-wide window opening. 
Windows installed! I did the left one. 
The last day of house building.
My tiny house knowledge and designing abilities advanced quite a lot. Here are the drawings I went in with:
And here are the designs I made after 2 weeks of training:
Please note the inclusion of a suspended meditation circle!
It turns out that Vermont has very few building codes and even fewer building inspectors, which attracts creative architects to the area and results in lots of whimsical and refreshing buildings. My class took a socially-distanced tour of a house that different classes of Yestermorrow students had designed and built over the course of 10 years – it was a trip.
One of our teachers, Mac (pictured here center right) had recently moved in to the house. 
A closeup of the foundation of the house. The faces you can see on the far right and the far left are plaster casts of the faces of some of the housebuilders. 
The downstairs living room. 
The main living room. 
The kitchen. The number, shapes, and formations of all the windows in this house are so cool – and evidence of some “we can, so why don’t we?” thinking. 
The kitchen counter. 
Fun tile inlay. 
Is there a mirror wall in this bathroom, or… 
Nope! Just your run-of-the mill tub in between two toilets. 
Stairs that extend into shelves. 
Archway below, wee bridge to the 3rd floor above. 
More window fun. 
And again!
I also befriended the classmate whose tiny house we built (hi Abby!) – she was kind enough to give me a tour of her beautiful property and the houses there she had built herself. It was really inspiring to meet someone who had bought land, cleared it, and put up one house and then another on it, and is now working on creating a 5-house affordable tiny community. Meeting an actual person who had done something like what I’m going to do made it seem much more attainable.
Lovely dining table among the timberframes. 
Swing in the kitchen! One of the magical things you can do when you design/build your own house. 
A fine example of timber framing in front of an artisanal hearth made with New Hampshire granite. 
Abby approaching the first house she and her ex-husband built on their 120 acres, after they hand-cleared the land. 
The second house Abby built on her property, and her current residence. 
Elbow and I posing on Abby’s patio, complete with the inflatable whale Elbow mailed me in my birthday box. 
Abby’s naturally occurring pond.
While at Yestermorrow I also was lucky enough to take a weekend tadelakt workshop with Liz Johnson, a mistress of the field. Tadelakt is a plastering technique that involves lots of rubbing with precious stones, and results in surfaces that have a water resistant finish. It’s very cool! Also very finicky – apparently tadelakt is the diva of the plastering world.
An illustration of the lime cycle: lime starts in the ground as calcium carbonate, then gets quarried and processed, during which its CO2 content is released into the air. Water is then added to the powdered lime to make plaster, and as it lives its life the plaster absorbs more than the amount of CO2 that its processing releases into the atmosphere. 
Our tadelakt studio for the weekend, and an excellent example of a timberframe and straw bale structure. 
Our plastering supplies, presided over by the teacher’s assistant David. 
Step one: mix powdered lime with pigment and the proper amount of water. 
Step two: use a trowel to apply and smooth the plaster. 
Step three: how the tile was supposed to look, and my tile looked after the teacher came to my aid. 
Step four: use precious stones (aka stones that have a hardness of 7 or higher on the Mohs scale) to rub and rub and rub some more. Then apply black olive oil soap, and keep rubbing. The stearate in the soap reacts with the calcium in the lime to form calcium stearate, aka soap scum. It’s this filmy top layer that gives tadelakt its water resistance. 
Step five: we then sgraffito-ed (cut shapes and lines into) our tiles. 
Step six: after scratching away the water resistant top layer, we could apply some water mixed with mineral pigment to color our creations. 
My finished tile! That ultramarine is so vibrantly blue, I think it’s portal to another universe.