Carving out the window sill for a retrofit
One of the great things about cob is how immensely sculptable the material is. But the sculpture doesn’t stop once the walls are dry. You can always come back to a wall with a shovel, pickaxe, machete, or other sturdy tool and do retrofitting fairly easily. I recently decided to redo some of the window sills in the house that were straight cob, and instead install some wood boards to make them more functional.
I’ve been enjoying the addition of the completed mud room to the house. It makes for a convenient place to kick off shoes, hang up jackets and other items that don’t clutter the house, create a better transition inside, and it gives us a tiny extra boost in the storage department! Click ahead for a few photos of the final room.
The new front door (that will soon receive a new coat of paint to cover up that blase beige)
The cob walls of the mud room addition are finally complete and all that remains now is to plaster the walls once the cob has fully dried. I’m very happy with how the addition process went and the end result. We’ve now got a great (tiny) little space for storing shoes and hanging coats, and it gives us an extra bit of buffer against exterior temperatures. Here’s a few pictures of the new front entryway of the house…
(Satisfied after today’s good progress – See the new cob at the top of the wall there?)
With help from my most enjoyable new work exchangers Dan and Danielle, I am inching closer and closer to the roof of my cob house. Today marked the completion of one of the few remaining and more challenging elements before that happens, though — installing joists for a wide shelf positioned above the (future) cob bed.
Yesterday, we built a joist rig with some 2×4s that could be buried in the cob: three 38? long joists attached to one long 2×4 banged out with lots of nails. This whole thing was placed on the cob wall and leveled, joists braced, and then cobbed in place. Hopefully the joists will be strong, as they are buired in all 16? of the cob wall. The shelf will be 22? wide and 7.5? long and will mostly be for storage.
Time will tell whether or not the joists are buried in enough wall to support the weight of potential clutter on the shelf. I am hopeful!
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.
The cob wall is growing day by day, despite tremendous recent rainstorms.
On Monday night, we suffered a huge storm, with 3.5″ of rain pouring down overnight, complete with blazing lightning and ground-shaking thunder. The following morning, a little flash flood passed through, dropping a whole additional inch of rain within a mere 20 minutes. The whole night and throughout the flood, I feared for the well-being of my house in progress, but the cob walls survived. The walls were covered in tarps (and not fantastically, might I add — there were many gaps/tears for water to enter), and the walls did get soaked, although there was nothing more than surface damage when all was said and done. The walls dried the next day, when the sun decided to come out.
Since that storm, I’ve been on an obsessive lookout for rain and trying to do a better job of tarping up the walls.
But anyway, progress has been brisk. Tom (a.k.a., Treetop), a friend from St. Louis came up on Tuesday night, and it’s been nice to have his extra help. Currently, the walls are sitting at a comfortable three feet in height most of the way around, perhaps even higher in some spots. We banged together and installed a window buck for a southeast-facing window at the beginning of the week, and yesterday, I starting cobbing the first shelf.
The make the shelf, I have been using “corbel cobs”, long, narrow, thin cobs packed with extra straw for tensile strength. These are laid on a level wall and then stitched together at the back, and pinched in the front. The first course hangs off the wall by about an inch, and the next corbel cob courses follow suit. A few more courses and the shelf will extend a good 6-7″ off the wall. This I intend to be a book shelf.
I estimate that the walls are about 1/3 of the way complete. The sand reserves are getting low, too — looks like I’ll need another nine ton delivery within a week or two!
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.
