Bottle ends

Many people have asked us about the pretty splashes of colored light in some of the photos of our cordwood walls. These are bottle ends (as opposed to log ends), created by inserting a colored bottle into a clear glass jar, and laying the unit into the cordwood wall in place of a log end.

Adapting Rob and Jaki Roy's technique somewhat to our available materials, we inserted the neck of a colored bottle into a clear mason- or mayonnaise-type jar, adjusting them until, from end to end, they formed a bottle end slightly longer than the 18-inch width of our cordwood walls (so that it would protrude a bit). To hold this width, we wrapped the bottle/jar unit with aluminum flashing and secured the flashing to the bottles with duct tape. (The flashing is necessary because if you were to push the neck of the colored bottle all the way into the jar and tape them directly together, the resulting bottle end would be too short for our 18-inch thick walls.) We punctured the duct tape in a number of places to enable the bottle end to breath.

Joe had searched diligently last year for unusually colored bottles, and found, in addition to the usual greens and browns, some lovely blue and aqua bottles. While our compressed building schedule prevented us from using a lot of bottle ends or designing elaborate patterns with them, we used them to nice effect in the south and east walls, where the angle of the sun makes them quite magical at certain times of day.