This last week, Janine and I almost finished off a lot of the paving around the pottery. It’s good to cover over most of the coarse gravel that is the left over remnants of the building site. Slowly slowly, we get the jobs done. We felt that we could face doing all the digging and shovelling on our own, so we hired a young local guy to help us with the digging and screeding. 

The week after the fire, we had a working bee here, when a few of our past students and other volunteers turned up and helped us clear away all the paving tiles that had been the floor of the old pottery. We avoided using much concrete in any of our buildings, because of the carbon debt that it involves, so all of our previous pottery buildings were earth floored and paved over a plastic membrane.

As each of the potteries that we built burnt down over the years, we dug up the pavers and stacked them to one side, then re-used them in the next building. We had to flip them over each time to get a clean fresh face upwards. Some of the pavers have melted plastic buckets fused into them, others have metal attached or even molten glass. It takes us a few days to get them all chipped, skutched, scraped and smooth.

This time there isn’t much choice, as both sides of the tiles have previously been through a fire. This is their third use. However, with persistence and a lot of chipping, scraping and washing we have an interesting new floor with a particular character. Fortunately, the crushed gravel substrate that we laid to build on is most suitable to lay pavers onto. AND it is easy to screed and level out to a smooth surface. So we don’t need to buy in anything to complete this job. Re-use, re-cycle, re-purpose!

This new paved area isn’t perfect, but just like me, it has its own peculiar character. Worn, trashed, recovered, reinvented and back in service again. A battered and aged look. Possibly a bit WabiSabi even? It isn’t stylish or pretty, but it functions on several levels.

These tiles used to be terra cotta orange and brown, but after two fires, they have been reduced to 50 shades of grey, charcoal black and creamy-grey-pink. It’s a very good match to the old re-cycled grey and rusty corrugated iron sheeting that we scrounged off old buildings to give the new pottery shed a weathered and worn-in, shibui look. Many of the tiles are broken or chipped, but we re-use them anyway, just as they are. This is real life, not Hollywood!

It has it’s own story embedded in its surface. It actually looks really appropriate as wrap-around paving, acting as an introduction to the next part of the story.

Welcome!