Coconut Village

Coconut Village

I love coconut and every once in a while I’ll buy one at the supermarket. The shells I usually save in case I can use them for a project. In April of 2017 I finally found a use for them and decided to create a coconut village in my front yard.

The base of a coconut house is a top and bottom shell connected together with a bamboo stick. To insert the stick I would need to drill a hole through the shells but these shells are made from very tough material. It took a pillar-drill as I couldn’t even put a dent in it with a normal hand-drill. For the floor and ceiling I used log slices. The log was ‘found’ in a newly cleared area of a nearby forest. What I hadn’t counted on was the fact that ‘fresh’ wood can split while drying (which it did). It wasn’t too bad but I would have preferred them in one piece. My next big mistake was using wood-glue to add the decoration and support pillars.
Wood-glue doesn’t do well when subjected to the elements and some of the houses started falling apart after just a few weeks of being outside. Tried to fix these houses using a glue-gun, and although it worked better, some elements still came lose after a few days of heavy rainfall. The village isn’t quite done yet, there are still three houses I need to finish. You can find a timeline of this project on Twitter.

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