life’s everyday adventures in an ecovillage, plus other intentional community, filmmaking, and random musings
ecosalon just posted an interview with Dancing Rabbit member Alline, who co-founded the soon-coming Milkweed Mercantile, a bed and breakfast slated to open at Dancing Rabbit sometime this winter. Check it out!
Note: Please find all of my cob building related content at my new blog, The Year of Mud: Building a cob house. Thanks! See you there!
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Tony Sirna here at Dancing Rabbit was recently interviewed for Ecovillage Radio. Check out the podcast here to learn all about life and goings-on here at DR: Dancing Rabbit on Ecovillage Radio.
Here’s a short little video I made at Alline’s request about the Milkweed Mercantile, a bed and breakfast currently under construction here at Dancing Rabbit. The Mercantile will also feature an organic cafe, and an eco general store. Check it out in the above video!
The other day, I mentioned that the Milkweed Mercantile, the soon-to-be bed and breakfast/cafe at Dancing Rabbit, is hoping to win $10K to put towards the purchase of a wind turbine.
Well, the Mercantile is now a finalist, meaning that they are that much closer to the prize! Please consider voting. It’s for a good cause. Seriously. Who ever heard of an off-the-grid bed and breakfast based in an ecovillage? Well, now you have. It’s real. It’s happening.
The Milkweed Mercantile, the first official business at Dancing Rabbit, is hoping to win $10K to put towards the purchase of a big ol’ wind turbine. The Mercantile is a bed and breakfast / cafe and shop, a beautiful straw bale building that is currently under construction and planned to open this winter, if all goes according to schedule.
This weekend, I had a strong urge to do some cobbing after dinner, during the sunset hours. So, last night we (myself and Dan and Danielle [my two work exchangers], later joined by Liat) ate dinner and stomped a batch of cob as the sun went down. By the time we were done stomping, it was super dark and pretty dang difficult to actually get the cob on the walls, but we managed.
After that first batch of cob, we figured it would be a good idea to make a campfire inside of the house. Ted and I set one up, and the house glowed like a giant woodstove. It looked great from the road, with a bright orange aura.
There was a full moon that cast a great light on the walls as it rose towards the sky later that night.
Fun stuff.
Tomorrow I return to Dancing Rabbit via the train. Well, lemme correct that: tomorrow I leave for Dancing Rabbit, but I won’t get back until later the next day. It’s a day and a half trip by train. It’s pretty grueling, but I prefer it to flying, mostly for environmental purposes.
It feels strange to be away for so long in the middle of summer, when most of the action is happening. I haven’t seen my house in weeks, and I can’t wait to get back to work, although I know the heat is pretty intense by now. I anxiously await finishing the cob walls and getting that roof up. I feel like once the roof is up, it will be pretty smooth sailing. (Not that the work will be so quick after that, but at least more familiar to me: plastering, making a cob bed, the earthen floor, etc.)
Here we go!
Ok, so my original estimate of 100 total batches of cob to complete the walls may have been off.
Eighty plus batches later, the walls stand at an average height of 3.5′ (not including the foundation), which is probably half the total amount of cob necessary. Some taller spots are now no longer workable without standing on a bench (as seen in the areas next to the south window in the photo above.)
Now begins the time when the actual cob application slows down, due to the extra step of having to stand on and move a bench or scaffolding (which I might just need to make soon…) to work the walls.
We didn’t get nearly the same amount of work done this week thanks the absurd amount of rain, but I guess a little break is an okay thing, too…
I thought I might touch upon the actual cobbing process, since I haven’t really talked about that specific element of building very much. Over the past few weeks, we have developed a very efficient working system, allowing us to quickly stomp, loaf, and apply the cob to the walls.
It begins with a “burrito”, the final cob mix of sand, clay, and straw. (Once cob has reached its ideal mixed state, you can roll it and it keeps its shape, which is something like the shape of a burrito).
Once we are satisfied with the mix, we begin to make “cobs”, or little loafs of the material. It’s almost like kneading dough: grab a bunch of cob, and make a loaf that can easily be picked up without breaking. (Making each loaf should take no more than a few seconds.) We call the really big ones “wonderbreads”.
We then carry these loaves to the wall (which is typically no more than a few feet from where we are mixing), and line them all up. (First we soak down the walls with some water so this newest layer gets worked in to the existing cob more easily.)
Next we take cobbers thumbs and “stitch” the cobs together, making sure the straw gets worked well, and the individual cobs can no longer be distinguished. This newest layer should also get worked into the layer underneath. This is a quick and rough job that goes quickly. The main key is create a cohesive, monolithic wall.
Next, we work the wall with our hands, creating a clean, plumb edge. Viola!
Here are some different angles of the cob house in progress:
This is an extraordinarily rainy spring. We’ve had so much rainfall so frequently, with so many warnings of flash floods and tornadoes the past number of weeks that it’s been hindering not just our gardens, but local farmers from getting their crops in the ground, too. And of course it’s been washing away all the mulch on our roads here, and slowing down building. At least the cisterns are full.
Every day the past few weeks, it seems that there’s been a warning of severe thunderstorms — never just thunderstorms, always severe thunderstorms. Thankfully they don’t always occur as predicted, or I’m sure my cob walls would have washed away by now.
I write this after another night of rain. The cob walls are very wet and soft to the touch in some spots, and the sun is nowhere to be had, but very thankfully (and surprisingly), there is no rain in the forecast the next two days. I am quite tired of worrying about the weather by now, and I really hope this rain dies down sooner rather than later. There is certainly benefit to having a roof up before your cob walls are built (as this very rainy season shows us), but unfortunately, that wasn’t really an option for me. I’m beginning to wish it was, though!
At some point over the winter, someone from TCNJ Magazine interviewed me about living at Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage. (TCNJ was the college that I attended).
Here’s the article: Alumnus finds fulfillment living in a sustainable community
The first course of the foundation is now pretty much complete.
Unfortunately, I had nowhere near enough urbanite that I thought I needed, and I made another trip to collect more over the weekend. This second time I played it safe and filled the trailer about twice as much as the first go-round, hopefully insuring that I would have more than plenty.
Yesterday, I ran into a little snag in the assembly of the foundation when I realized I needed a massive slab of urbanite for underneath the door frame. Either that or I could spend some time attempting to level a couple of smaller, very uneven pieces. Forget that, I thought.
I went into Rutledge with four others, thinking we could heft an appropriately massive, flat slab I spotted earlier that day. Apparently not. It was hugely heavy. Instead, Brandon, a (very proactive!) visitor got Zimmermans Excavating (which was just down the road) to bring their backhoe and lift the piece into the pickup truck. We drove back to DR and to my warren, backed up to the spot in the foundation where the piece needed to be, and tipped the slab off the truck bed onto the ground, and then wiggled and walked the piece into its final resting place and then leveled it. That single piece of urbanite was probably three to four times the size of any other piece we had collected.
Later that day, Jeff and I stomped the first batch of earthen mortar (clay sand mortar) at a ratio of three buckets of sand to one clay. This we used to fill in the gaps (think cement mortar) between urbanite, along with gravel and smaller chunks of concrete. Today, we pretty much completed the first course and began stacking pieces for the second, final course.
I suspect this second course will be much trickier…
The Year of Mud: Building a cob house Green Options: Posts by Brian Liloia