A couple of weeks ago, we hosted our first Natural Building Essentials Workshop of the summer. What fun! The weather held out and we had great camping conditions, and April cooked up a veritable feast for our intrepid mudslingers. I think it’s fair to say everyone had a great time, myself included. Check out some photos of the course below!
May 2018 Natural Building Essentials
Our 5 day Essentials Workshop is an introduction to the building blocks of natural homes — clay, sand, and straw. We built a stud wall stuffed with light clay straw insulation, two cob benches, a cob oven mockup, and we practiced various types of clay plaster. A big emphasis in this class is describing the differences between natural building materials, especially how and why materials like cob and straw bale perform very differently from one another. Understanding natural building fundamentals early in the process is key to making good design decisions later on, and skipping a lot of potentially drastic errors.
Here’s a testimonial from PJ C. who came out for the course:
Thanks again for such an incredible week, we enjoyed ourselves immensely and it was a wonderful group of people all around. You’re a great and natural teacher, very easygoing and fun to learn from. The food was excellent and far beyond our expectations (as vegans). While I loved the food, I think if you’re going to serve that quality and quantity of food, you should charge a bit more for the workshop.
I thought we covered a lot of ground and I loved all of the hands-on experience. I appreciated seeing the different stages and finishes of plasters. I loved the site visits and seeing different people’s homes, that was one of the most valuable parts. And opening up your own home (esp. for people to have a hot shower) was very generous. LOVED your library, thanks for letting us access that, so much inspiration there! Seeing other people’s books is one of my favorite things in life. Your property is beautiful and has a lot of potential, I look forward to seeing it evolve over the years.
Thanks to everyone who came out and contributed to a wonderful experience!
Additional images provided by PJ Chmiel
Looks great Ziggy, I joined a similar kinf of workshop beginning of May in England where I attended an earthbag building workshop with Paulina Wochiechowska, of Earth Hands and Houses, this was also great fun and learned a lot at the same time!!.
End of September we’ll (my wife and I) go to Sicily to fence of the plot of land with an earthbag wall. My son bought a piece of land with the idea to build a holiday home. Thus far it is only permitted to build a wall and toolshed. We’re not in a hurry because we both just retired. Keep up the good work Ziggy!! Warm regards, Jan and Maud.
Sounds like a fun project, be sure to share some of your progress Jan!