About this blog

The Year of Mud… continuing…

Hullo. I am Brian Liloia, but I am also called Ziggy. I’m a 25-year-old currently living at Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage in northeastern Missouri, learning to fulfill my desires to live more sustainably and self-sufficiently.

This is The Year of Mud, a blog all about building with cob. I started the blog when I began to design my own cob house, back in the winter of 2008. The house was completed in July of 2009, but I’ve continued The Year of Mud to document what it’s like to live in a cob house, and the changes that continue to occur.

Now I’m building a roundwood post and beam, hybrid straw bale and cob kitchen with a few friends, which I’ll also document here. The Year of Mud proves to be more than that — it’s a way of being.

What is cob?

Cob is an ancient, proven building technique practiced all over the world. It’s the simple combination of sand, clay, and straw, mixed by foot, and then applied by hand to form massive walls. Cob is beautiful, sculptural, natural, low-impact, and sustainable. It is intuitive, easy to learn, and inexpensive. Cob homes are built from materials straight from the earth. Cob allows its owner-builder endless freedom in way of design, and you can learn cobbing basics in a day. It is indeed labor-intensive, but it becomes a labor of love, and what better way to build a home then by getting your hands and feet dirty in the mud, without the need for loud power tools and heavy machinery?

Contact

You can contact me at evacindustry [at] gmail [dot] com. I like to hear from people.