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.
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 finished (well, almost finished) digging a curtain drain around my house to help deal with poor drainage problems. It’s a two foot deep trench, filled with gravel and drained to daylight. It wraps around the whole house and is centered under the eaves.
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I spent about four days over the past two weeks with a crew of other Dancing Rabbit and Red Earth folks working to deconstruct an old house in a nearby town. This was the most complete deconstruction experience I’ve had thus far — it was a great opportunity to start from scratch in pulling apart a house, piece by piece, revealing the innards, and scratching my head the whole time about the incredibly questionable and pretty damn ugly building decisions in this particular building. The thing sure was hideous with thoughtless additions and ugly materials, but we still got a good amount of wood and other useful materials out of it.
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.
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.
