Our timber frame house plans are complete, and now we are prepared to proceed with acquiring our timber. We are providing the plans free for download for folks interested in viewing the 3D drawings and floor plans. Read ahead for more!
Small Strawbale is not a book that will prepare you to construct your own straw bale house, in the sense that it will not give you all the gory building details that go into straw bale home construction. Instead, it will provide a nice bit of juice in the inspiration department for those folks intrigued by building with bales, or hoping to break ground on one of their own houses in the future. Read More
The Strawtron timber frame plans! (SE corner view)
I’ve been exchanging many emails with Tom Cundiff over the past month or so about the timber frame plans and drawings for Strawtron, our new house. I’m excited to now show off these great 3D drawings that he has come up with!
Here’s the lowdown on the new house design… Read More
It’s spring, and the building season has officially begun. I’ve been a bit consumed with thinking about building lately — between doing some work around the house, planning for the next building season for the cooperative kitchen, thinking about a new home design, and serving on Dancing Rabbit’s new Common House design committee (we are a group of five tasked with designing a new common house intended to serve a population of 150 people), I have plenty to think about in the building arena. Sometimes it’s exhausting.
But as soon as I am able to actually do work, and not just think about it, it feels a lot better.
Tiny dry-stacked woodshed foundation
As if there wasn’t enough to do this year (between house changes and a mud room addition, and building a temporary kitchen and of course the full four seasons kitchen, and a whole mess of other stuff), April and I have decided to build a small cob woodshed. Cob woodshed? Isn’t that overkill? Well, sure… but with all of that extra cob we have lying around from the bed demolition, it’s the perfect use for it!
Here’s a rough drawing of the kitchen design. In this sketch you can get a sense of the shape and arrangement of the building. On the east is a wide covered porch for outdoor cooking in the summer. The building has a sizable greenhouse on the south side for starting seedlings and additional heat in the winter, and a west-facing balcony can be accessed from the loft above the dining area on that side of the structure. There are three roof lines — I think the building sorta looks like a duck in this drawing. Outdoor eating will be on the east, along with a cob oven and perhaps even a cob wall along the north border of our “warren” (plot of land) for privacy / a windbreak / aesthetics / sound protection.
If I could find our floor plans drawing, I would post that too, but I actually want to make a more accurate one now that the trench has been dug. Unfortunately it’s hard to measure the drainage trench when it’s covered in snow. Anyway, expect those soon!
Linda Smiley’s beautiful cob home
After the Natural Building Colloquium in Eagle Point, Oregon, I traveled with Ianto Evans and Linda Smiley to their home in Coquille, OR: Cob Cottage Company.
For those unawares, Ianto and Linda are two very influential cob building pioneers in North America, and authors of The Hand-Sculpted House, the number one go-to book for cob construction. They have been a huge inspiration for me during my house design process, and reading their book sealed the deal for building my home out of cob. Ianto and Linda have many years of experience building with mud. It was an honor to be able to meet them and spend several nights at their place. It was a great experience, and I took plenty of photos to share here on my own website.
I, along with four others, have embarked upon a new building adventure. We have just begun the very early phases of building a shared kitchen and social space. Thomas, Ali, Liat, April, and I are part of a sub-community at Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage. Thomas, Ali, Liat, and I started discussions last year about working and living more closely with one another. These talks and many more discussions throughout this year lead us to design a kitchen space that we can all share. We started eating together during this summer in a rugged outdoor kitchen setup (we keep our food in a filing cabinet, for example), but we definitely want a more permanent structure. Read More
There are a few natural buildings that stand out in my mind as some of the most beautiful examples. One of them is Meka’s cob cottage. Meka Bunch of Wolf Creek, Oregon built this stunning cob house over a four year period. Complete with hand-sculpted furniture, shelves and nooks built directly into the walls, arched windows, and a killer custom staircase, his cob building is a divine artistic achievement.
Check out the photos of Meka’s cob cottage for yourself.
In an earlier post about my cob cottage plans, I mentioned that I had some new design ideas. I’ve done some thinking about a new shape for the house, this latest (and perhaps final?) design being more like a spiral. (Or a scotch tape dispenser if you think about it.)
Check it out:
Originally, the design was more like a rounded rectangle, with the entrance in the southeast, opening directly into the room. This time, the door is in the northeast, opening into a curve of the house. This gives me a little space for shoes, jackets, etc., and it also means that people won’t immediately see the whole room upon entering. It’s a more gentle transition from outdoors this way. I’m pretty excited about this. It changes the feel of the whole building.
I also settled upon a reciprocal roof design. I don’t have an exact plan yet, but I have a good feel for how many beams I’ll need. I’ll probably get some oak wood poles from our land here if all goes well. Using a cart, I will transport these poles to my plot, and strip the bark before constructing the roof. I’m not totally sure what the layers above the poles will look like, but I’m still planning on having a living roof, probably with an EPDM membrane. EPDM is a type of synthetic rubber product, intended for waterproofing (ponds, for example). I should note that this product is the least exciting part of the roof construction. It’s a petroleum product. Unfortunately, I have not discovered any detailed instructions for creating a living roof without synthetic materials, but it must be possible since it’s been done in the past in places like Sweden. So instead of taking a gamble, I am going to be using EPDM, which is apparently very durable and has a long lifespan. Overall, I intend to use as few human-made, synthetic building materials in my cottage as is possible. EPDM is one exception, though.
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.