June 2010
It was always our intent to build something using glass bottles and the wash house presented itself as a perfect place to start. The south facing wall was framed using 6" x 6" cedar timbers. This wall is part of the shower area and gets a great deal of light hitting it all year round. Perfect for a glass bottle feature.
Being avid beer drinkers we'd been collecting, and dutifully emptying the bottles for quite a while.
Alexander Keith's constituted the lion's share of the bottles we collected, but as we didn't want the wall to be totally built of brown glass we sampled other fine ales and ciders to collect some green and clear bottles. These would be strategically placed during the build to break up the sea of amber.
Knocking together a small frame we tested some concrete mixes to find the right consistency of the mortar mix. We knew from research that you can't build too many rows at a time as the weight begins to squeeze the mortar from the lower rows so we aimed at three rows at a time each day until we reached the top.
You lay the bottles much the same way as bricks but you have to push the mortar between each bottle to make sure there are no gaps, this takes a lot of time but is worth it for a cleaner and tighter look over all.
We built the wall with the bottle bases facing into the building and the necks facing to the out side. Renata corked every bottle before they were added to the wall. We're hoping that the trapped air will heat up during the day making the bottles warm to the touch on the inside of the shower area.
Once the mortar sets, cleaning up the residue from the glass is fairly easy, plenty of water a wire brush and elbow grease. The inside looks amazing when the light is filtering through the wall and feels great to the touch.
The final bottle count is 797 - do you feel a song coming on? We used about 10 30kg bags of ready mix mortar. Building the wall was definatley a two person job and took quite a bit of time, but with all things in life you get what you pay for, even if payment is with your newly aquired beer belly!
It was always our intent to build something using glass bottles and the wash house presented itself as a perfect place to start. The south facing wall was framed using 6" x 6" cedar timbers. This wall is part of the shower area and gets a great deal of light hitting it all year round. Perfect for a glass bottle feature.
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| Normally if you saw this many empties at a job site "Work Safe BC" would have an issue. In our case they were building materials. |
Alexander Keith's constituted the lion's share of the bottles we collected, but as we didn't want the wall to be totally built of brown glass we sampled other fine ales and ciders to collect some green and clear bottles. These would be strategically placed during the build to break up the sea of amber.
Knocking together a small frame we tested some concrete mixes to find the right consistency of the mortar mix. We knew from research that you can't build too many rows at a time as the weight begins to squeeze the mortar from the lower rows so we aimed at three rows at a time each day until we reached the top.
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| Built three rows at a time, allowing the mortar to set up between each three rows |
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| She's a corker! |
We built the wall with the bottle bases facing into the building and the necks facing to the out side. Renata corked every bottle before they were added to the wall. We're hoping that the trapped air will heat up during the day making the bottles warm to the touch on the inside of the shower area.
Once the mortar sets, cleaning up the residue from the glass is fairly easy, plenty of water a wire brush and elbow grease. The inside looks amazing when the light is filtering through the wall and feels great to the touch.
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| View from the inside shower area. |
Labels:
Glass bottle wall
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