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

Posts Tagged ‘Tools’

Finish Earthen Plaster: Part 2: Applying Earth Plaster

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!
Once you have mixed your deliciously smooth finish earthen plaster, it’s time to apply it to make your cob walls shine. It’s a seemingly simple process, but there is a certain [...]

Building a lean-to trestle

Over the weekend, I built a lean-to trestle. The cob walls are getting too tall in some spots to work from the ground. I’ve been using a long bench that Thomas kindly lent to me, but I needed at least one other (and taller) option to reach high up.
I based this trestle off of a [...]

Cobbers thumbs

The great thing about cob is its low-tech nature. You don’t need many fancy tools to work with the medium. Cobbers thumbs are useful wooden hand tools for pounding cob into place on walls, and “stitching” the material together. The fat, blunt ends are good for the pounding, and the pointed ends are useful for [...]

Human-powered transportation

Today, Thomas and I went out to the land to collect and transport some of the pin oak trees I’ve cut to the village. We went out with the infamous ‘Cynder cart’ (a homemade handcart), which would serve as our sturdy, two-wheeled transport vehicle.
First, we had to drag the 30 foot long trees out to [...]