Hello dear friends. It has been a busy month for me. I started building a house on my property. And being a brave soul I wanted to try something very organic and healthy for my cottage - a cob building. Which is not only DIRT cheap but is made on site from local materials and supposed to be excellent for creating "ideal" micro climate indoors. OK, so after a bit of reading and then dumping all the books we started like this:
A BIG MESS!!!!
You probably know, the mixture is made of clay, sand and straw. Everything mixed by horse a 100 years back and by many feet these days. Then there is many ways to put it on a foundation but we chose the drop and shape method without too many straight lines in mind.
It takes a lot of guys to get the stuff moving, but it's not bad if you know a few teenagers that is full of energy.
Wall being covered for the rain not to wash them down.... Silly thought, the more we did this the less the wall dried. We skipped this later on the project and the rain did no damage what so ever....
Work being done by layers of about two to three feet. That's about as high you can go in one layer before the wall starts shifting.
In about 3 weeks a team of 6 people of who only 2 knows little about building managed to raise a 2.5 meter walls. Not bad huh??
That's the walls before we put up the second layer beams and the roof. It's on the way now and I'll show you more if there is any interest at all. For me it's completely new experience and way out of my comfort zone in home construction, probably I could not have chosen a more adventurous road to build my cottage, but so far so good. We have a solid solid wall, 50cm in width a supposedly very warm, we made it in a nature friendly manner and everybody learned something new. Lets see what more crazy stuff I can manage to pull Next. A turf roof to get everybody off their feet!
What do you think??
More random photos:
See ya 'round fellow bushcafters!
A BIG MESS!!!!
You probably know, the mixture is made of clay, sand and straw. Everything mixed by horse a 100 years back and by many feet these days. Then there is many ways to put it on a foundation but we chose the drop and shape method without too many straight lines in mind.
It takes a lot of guys to get the stuff moving, but it's not bad if you know a few teenagers that is full of energy.
Wall being covered for the rain not to wash them down.... Silly thought, the more we did this the less the wall dried. We skipped this later on the project and the rain did no damage what so ever....
Work being done by layers of about two to three feet. That's about as high you can go in one layer before the wall starts shifting.
In about 3 weeks a team of 6 people of who only 2 knows little about building managed to raise a 2.5 meter walls. Not bad huh??
That's the walls before we put up the second layer beams and the roof. It's on the way now and I'll show you more if there is any interest at all. For me it's completely new experience and way out of my comfort zone in home construction, probably I could not have chosen a more adventurous road to build my cottage, but so far so good. We have a solid solid wall, 50cm in width a supposedly very warm, we made it in a nature friendly manner and everybody learned something new. Lets see what more crazy stuff I can manage to pull
Next. A turf roof to get everybody off their feet!What do you think??
More random photos:
See ya 'round fellow bushcafters!
