If you came to this website via my recent interview with Boing Boing (how to build a Hobbit House): welcome! You may be curious to learn more details about the construction of my cob house at Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage. Check out these links to some of my previous posts for more information about building with cob.
Avi Solomon recently interviewed me for a bit on Boing Boing, titled Brian “Ziggy” Liloia on How To Build Your Own Hobbit House.
In the interview, I talk about my decision to build with cob, the great rewards and challenges in building your own home, the community building experience at Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage, and more.
If you’re new to this blog (or even if you’re not), please check it out!
p.s. Want to learn even more about how to build your own cob house? Check out The Year of Mud: Build a Cob House book!
At last, I finished producing my cob building book, The Year of Mud: Building a Cob House. It is available for purchase through Blurb.com. This book is a story of how I constructed my own home, and what it is like to build with cob. The book features dozens of color images, how-to information and building recipes, and inspiration for those wanting to learn more about cob and earthen building.
Here’s a synopsis and some details about the cob house manual:
I recently had the fortunate opportunity to check out Mud, Hands, A House (or El Barro, Las Manos, La Casa, its original Spanish title), a great natural building documentary provided to me by the kind Max of Firespeaking.com.
It’s an educational, how-to focused natural building documentary with a wealth of instructional segments, led by Jorge Belanko, an engaging master natural builder based in Patagonia, Argentina.
Michael Janzen of Tiny House Design is building a tiny, 80 square foot house… for free. And word is getting out about his project, which is one of many in the new tiny house wave. From Michael:
The core values of the tiny house movement are that living simply in small spaces empowers us. Committing to a tiny house removes many of the burdens we accepted when we bought into the idea of a “normal” American lifestyle. Instead of focusing on how much we can afford, the tiny space forces us to consider how little we really need.
Check out more about his nifty free tiny house project at Yes! Magazine and visit his website for more news and musings on the tiny house movement! Cool stuff.
Michael Janzen of Tiny House Design is building a tiny, 80 square foot house… for free. And word is getting out about his project, which is one of many in the new tiny house wave. From Michael:
The core values of the tiny house movement are that living simply in small spaces empowers us. Committing to a tiny house removes many of the burdens we accepted when we bought into the idea of a “normal” American lifestyle. Instead of focusing on how much we can afford, the tiny space forces us to consider how little we really need.
Check out more about his nifty free tiny house project at Yes! Magazine and visit his website for more news and musings on the tiny house movement! Cool stuff.
Just a quick update to feature a few cob building blogs that I’ve been checking out lately:
earthen acres: Danielle is building a very small cob cottage and documenting her progress. So far her home has a completed dry-stacked (and beautiful!) urbanite foundation with the first layers of cob on the wall. I am excited to see how this little structure gets on.
mud for everyone: I haven’t ventured very far into Erica Ann’s blog, but damn if that cob loop-de-loop isn’t cool! Check out the June 1 post.
clay sand straw blog: I’ve enjoyed perusing these folks’ website and the wealth of photos of their building projects, so I anticipate future updates on this new blog.
Any others you would like to share? Comment and lemme know.
I love a good building book for inspiration, especially when it contains photos of inventive and intelligent homes from around 
the world. Imagine houses with six feet-thick seaweed roofs, deep-nestled and hand-carved cave homes, and pigeon-harboring huts made of mud. These and more are all vividly documented in Built By Hand: Vernacular Buildings Around the World, a most inspiring bit of natural building eye candy. Built by Hand is a hardcover collection of photographs by Yoshio Komatsu of traditional buildings of all styles across the globe.
I was very fortunate to recently catch wind of Carpenters from Europe and Beyond, an incredibly valuable traditional carpentry resource from France’s Ministry of Culture. The website is host to a wealth of information about the history of carpentry, the people who honed the craft, and videos of modern day traditional carpenters continuing to work by hand, especially in the timber framing tradition.
Ever since I started building my house, I’ve thought about writing a book about the process of building. Now that my house is actually complete, I’m thinking more seriously about the prospect. The possibilities seem numerous, and the prospect is exciting. I’ve kept up this website and an actual written journal very obsessively so that I have clear documentation, and I also have plenty of photos of the entire construction, as well.
About The Year of Mud
Hi there, I’m Ziggy. In 2008, I launched The Year of Mud while building my first natural home. This website 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. In 2012, we started offering Natural Building Workshops, so you can learn essential hands-on skills to build your own natural home.
