The Year of Mud: Building a cob house Rotating Header Image

New cob kitchen documentation website: The House That Millet Built

Welcome! I hope you'll follow along as I continue to build my first cob house. Please consider subscribing to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

A month ago, I mentioned the new building project I am working on: a community kitchen and social space. I have created a new website, The House That Millet Built, to document the construction of the building.

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.

A visit to Cob Cottage Company: impressions and photos

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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 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.

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The Year of Mud: Cob house picture slideshow

Here’s a selection of cob building photos from the start to finish of building my house, assembled into a slideshow. Enjoy!

Natural Building Colloquium 2009 thoughts

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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.

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Cob stories and photos coming… soon…

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.

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A brief update

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…

New building project!: Sub-community kitchen and social house

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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.

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Interior photos of my cob house GOBCOBATRON

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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!

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Building codes, zoning laws, and B.S. bureaucracy

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.

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More cob oven details and photos

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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!)

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