Roots & Roofs 4 (April-May 2024)

Our “Roots & Roofs” project continues!

From 29th of April to 14th of May 2024 we held the fourth phase of the project and in this article we will tell you our progress during these 2 amazing weeks!

First time reading about this project?

Here’s a small introduction to get started:

Roots & Roofs is Acarbio’s project with the objective of creating an educational centre in the forest that teaches about living in nature, outdoor and experiential learning, sustainability, natural building, and permaculture. The project has been initiated with the support of experts from the Greek organisation Cob.gr and it’s been carried out in several phases.

In this project we built a hobbit house, a tree house and an outdoor kitchen.

Click here to find out more about the previous phases of Roots & Roofs.

And now let’s get into the fourth phase

During the fourth phase participants from France, Spain, Bulgaria, Romania, Greece, Hungary, Sweden, Belgium, Italy and Germany arrived in Tramonti with the aim of being a part of the soul of this ecobuilding by actively participating in our TEAM ESC project.

During the first day of the project they started to get to know each other and the forest in which they would have to live for two weeks. The best thing to achieve this was a treasure hunt and other games. Here are some pictures:

Then the main project started!

For this fourth phase participants finalised the outdoor kitchen, made some improvements in the hobbit house and continued working on the tree house.

Now let’s get more into details in each area.

In the outdoor kitchen the first thing to do was to make the roof. Volunteers peeled the wood that would later support the beams and then put everything together.

At the same time other volunteers were working on plastering the actual kitchen, applying tadelakt (Moroccan technique that allows the creation of high quality natural decorative finishing for bathrooms, kitchens etc.) and then painting the kitchen.

Another group was working in the hobbit house. Here the task was similar to what was happening in the outdoor kitchen. First they started with the plastering and then they proceeded to cover with white paint all the walls except for one spot where one of the volunteers painted an amazing tree.

Then as in every house there is the bathroom that is actually the most magical area of the hobbit house. This is thanks to the patient work of the volunteers who used scrap tiles to create an outstanding mosaic. Using the same technique they also created a mirror with pieces of discarded glass. In between the pieces they played with colours to resemble the sun.

The work on the hobbit house wasn’t only on the inside. Others were also working on the outside, refreshing it with white paint.

And now we can go up to the tree house. Here the dome was already formed in the previous editions but the wood cells were still open. So our committed volunteers first cut the plywood with the specific shape of the cell, then they prepared the wood on the dome by smoothing it in order to install the plywood and closing the dome. In order to utilise natural light the dome was covered with plywood only in the lower half, while on the upper part the participants installed a transparent cover always in the shape of cells.

After finishing all the tasks in the three areas of the outdoor kitchen, hobbit house and tree house, in the last days of the project the participants made sure to make the eco building more welcoming and cosy by building handrests and creating a flower bed at the entrance to the hobbit house. Here volunteers planted flowers and wild trees they found in the forest around them and used empty tree trunks as vases.

And of course let’s not forget about the most important thing: the door!