If you’ve read anything on this blog in the last four months, you’ll know I am busy building my cob house. It’s now almost mid-August and I am realizing that I’ll want at least an extra pair of hands (or two) for sometime in September and October.
So, if you are interested in learning and helping to build a house with cob, contact me for more information about work exchanging.
First: get all of the details at this link: building with cob work exchange.
Then: contact me!
The past week has been extremely productive, thanks to some help from Apple and a few other folks from Sandhill Farm. The cob walls are nearing 85% complete, I’d say. But before I finish them, there are other things to take care of, too. Namely, I need to install lintels above my windows and doorway, and start preparing for the roof.
Lintels are lengths of material (usually, slab wood, pole wood, milled lumber, bamboo, etc.) used to span window frames in natural buildings. They help to bear and spread the weight of the material (cob, in my case) above windows and doorways. Depending on the material, they can be pretty decorative, too.
I cut some osage orange wood for my smaller window lintels, leaving the bark intact for a more ‘raw’ look. I’m pretty happy with the effect.
For my large south-facing window (see top photo), I chose to use some pole wood that I got from Skyhouse. I wanted something straight and easy to work with, but also round, so these fit the bill. These lintels are shorter than is ideal (they only overhang the window by six inches on both sides), but hopefully they will still get the job done.
I am just now starting to think about how the rafters of my reciprocal roof will be placed on the walls, so these next few days will be heavier on the “thinking work” side of things…
Here’s a normal cob wall (with no/near zero significant water damage):
And another wall that has been pelted in a flash flood:
The damage isn’t that significant (it’s just surface runoff), but it sure still bugs me…
Rainiest year. Ever.
When I left DR three weeks ago, I figured all that rain we’ve been experiencing had left us, too, but boy was I wrong. Yesterday, we experienced yet another incredible flash floor, dumping a good 2″ or so of rain on us in less than half an hour. We just can’t seem to get a few dry days.
The day was gorgeous until a mere hour before this storm rolled in. We went to a party at Sandhill Farm, and before we left I decided against covering my house, noting the clear skies, but I should have known… never take a chance… (Covering the walls is really annoying at this point because it takes a good half hour to do it right, hence my reluctance.)
Needless to say, my house was left exposed (although it was quickly covered pre-storm with the help of some folks who were staying back at DR, the wind [60 MPH+!] whipped any and all tarps off the walls).
The north wall took a bit of a beating, washing away a decent amount of cob surface material, exposing a lot of straw. But really, it’s only just surface damage (although it still really sucks to see), and the integrity of the walls has not been lessened.
Let’s just say: lesson learned. I don’t want to see that happen again. (But I wonder if it really would have even mattered had I myself tarped the walls before we left… oh well…)
I set a goal to finish the cob walls of my house before I left Dancing Rabbit for a visit to New Jersey come July 12. I thought this would be possible several weeks ago, when progress was very brisk, but with last week’s rain, I suffered a setback. Granted, there is absolutely no reason why I have to finish the walls before I leave… I have plenty of time to finish this house before late fall arrives, but I like to set markers. I get pretty crazy about wanting to get X number of batches by Y date, etc… but mostly it’s all in good fun and I don’t get that hung up on it.
I have some help coming in the form of visitors tomorrow and some guests over the weekend, so maybe I won’t be too far off from my original goal after all… we’ll see! These are exciting times.
I didn’t get a heck of a lot of time to work on the cob house since it was very wet and gray and rainy throughout much of the past six days. I must say that it’s a real drag constantly worrying about the weather and covering up the walls every night with tarps, and hoping that gusts of wind don’t come in and mess things up. (Usually, if it’s raining and not very windy, the building gets less wet than when it is both rainy/windy.) I frequently have a hard time sleeping when it’s thundering and storming at night because I worry about the condition of the building.
Of course, it’s my luck that I just so happen to be building a cob house during one of the wettest years on record. But I must say, the house is faring quite well despite the numerous flash floods and constant storming. The walls have gotten significantly wet in some spots a few times thus far, but the damage has been minimal. There has been nothing more than some minor runoff of material and the integrity of the walls has not been threatened in any way. Cob astounds me in that way — it’s simply strong and can take a beating.
I imagine once the walls are complete and the roof is up, this building is going to be standing for a long, long time…
Over the weekend, I built a lean-to trestle. The cob walls are getting too tall in some spots to work from the ground. I’ve been using a long bench that Thomas kindly lent to me, but I needed at least one other (and taller) option to reach high up.
I based this trestle off of a design in The Hand-Sculpted House, but I made it a bit more simplistic, since I didn’t need this trestle to be super-tall (and because my carpentry skills are pretty marginal). I used some old 2x4s and some 1x lumber. The trestle is about five feet wide and leans against the cob wall for support, and gives me an extra three feet to my standing height. It works just lovely.
The house is starting to feel much more like an actual house now that some of the walls are 6+ feet tall. Standing inside, it’s also easier to imagine what the final house will look like, where things will go, and how big the space feels.
If there’s one thing you’ve probably heard/read about cob many times before, it’s probably the fact that cob is immensely sculptural.
Lately, I have been working at a much slower pace since I have been working on sculpting various cob book shelves and other little storage nooks into the walls of my house. The photo above is a small shelf immediately next to the entrance. When I look at it now, I think of the mouth of a snake or the jaw of some other creature.
This wide bookshelf extends almost a foot from the wall, and is nearly 18″ at its peak height in the center. The shape is pretty strange and not exactly what I intended to sculpt, but I kinda like it now that it is done. (I can always do a little bit of carving with a machete if I decide to alter the appearance.) I will build a similarly-sized shelf right above this one.
This mushroom-shaped window came to me in a something like a vision the morning before I started to work. I acted upon the impulse and stuck a piece of sheet glass in the wall and began to sculpt around the glass to make something roughly mushroom-like. I’m pretty satisfied with the end result. It will look much cleaner once the walls are plastered, I think.
I carved these coat hooks from some mulberry wood and planted them in some fresh cob this afternoon. I mostly just cut the wood to size, whittled it down a bit, and smoothed it out. These are located right near the entrance for jackets and other things for hanging. I hope these hooks give the effect that they growing out of the wall once it’s all said and done.
Tiny House Blog is a website dedicated to featuring tiny houses (er, go figure), including both prefabs and natural building designs. Anyway, they just put up a link to my own cob cottage project.
Yea!
Hi there, I’m Ziggy. In 2008, I launched The Year of Mud while building my first natural home. This blog is a collection of personal stories and experiences building with clay, straw, and wood over the past 15+ years. A few of the things that get me fired up are natural plasters, timber framing, & Japanese architecture. Since 2012, we’ve been hosting Natural Building Workshops so you can learn essential skills to build your own natural home.
