Building the Cob and Green Roof Garden Wall – Part 5: The Green Roof

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From the earliest conception of our garden wall, we dreamed of topping it with a green roof. However until we actually started building the roof we had no idea how we were going to go about it. We first needed some sort of truss system since we wanted the roof to provide a protective eave for the wall. Again, we turned to Sketchup to model the dimensions of these trusses and settled on a pitch of 4 in 12 and a horizontal eve span of roughly 6 1/2″. We built the trusses out of dunnage from the lumber yard garbage bin, a GREAT source for scrap 2x4s, and fitted them along the top of the wall, tacking them in to place with blobs of cob. We did our best to tilt each one to rest roughly 90 degrees to the tangent of the curve at each point.

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Building the Cob and Green Roof Garden Wall- Part 3: The Wall Fireplace

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Early in the cobbing phase of building our wall, we decided to incorporate a fireplace in to it. We had so much fun building our first fireplace, and enjoyed using it so much, that this seemed like a perfect fit for our wall build. We placed it midspan on the soft curved wall, facing the original fireplace which allows us to have double fire place nights when our friends come over.

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