This new kitchen will feature hybrid walls (probably featuring some cob, or balecob?), an urbanite foundation, a roundwood post and beam frame, and hopefully, a hand-split shake roof. It will be electricity-free. This new building project presents a lot of new exciting learning opportunities.
Anyway, if you have enjoyed any of the documentation process here at The Year of Mud, I hope you will follow along on The House That Millet Built as construction continues! Look for more updates soon.
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 decades 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.
The Natural Building Colloquium is an annual gathering for natural builders to share their work and experiences, and to create a stronger network between builders. The 2009 event at the beautiful Camp Latgawa in Oregon was my first one, and I was very happy to have the chance to attend.
I just got back from a three week stint in Oregon and Berkeley, CA. Along the way I went to the Cob Cottage Company and Aprovehco. Expect some photos and writing… soonish. Here’s a photo of Bedrock, a little cabin at the Cob Cottage Company, for now.
Crappy weather the past week – clouds and rain and minimal amounts of sunshine make for dreary days and little electricity in the Common House, hence a total lack of updates this week, even though there is news to tell.
Today I am headed out to Oregon for the annual Natural Building Colloquium, a regular gathering of natural builders. I’ve never been to one before and I’m greatly looking forward to it. I’ll be in OR for at least a week, if not more, because I’m hoping to meet up with folks and do some traveling around the area, perhaps touring all of the great cob and natural building happenings in the state.
We’ll see what happens. But don’t expect any updates for a while! Off I go…
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.
These are a little overdue… here are some interior photos of my cob house, GOBCOBATRON. (I’ve been waiting until I had some better furniture in there… and although the furnishings are not completely done, this is mostly it!
Living in rural northeast Missouri, one thing I have (very thankfully) not had to deal with is building codes. At times, I have totally taken it for granted that I could just wake up one morning, and decide to build a house without telling anyone. There is nothing preventing me from building a home (or any type of structure, really) here. That’s why I can build a house out of cob, without electricity, with a living roof, with all of these crazy things that would NEVER fly in many other places.
No, I’m not trying to climb inside, believe it or not… I’m just cleaning out the sand form in this photo. (This part of the cob oven construction makes for some interesting photo opportunities!)
Hullo. I am Brian, but I am also called Ziggy. I'm a 25-year-old currently living at Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage. In April of 2008, I began building my own cob house. Here I shall document the entire cob building process. This is the Year of Mud.
