The Year of Mud: Cob and natural building » urbanite

All the current goings-on

ziggy — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 03:38:55 +0000

Man, goings-on is a weird word. It just never looks or sounds exactly right. Anyway, there have been a number of these so-called goings-on lately. Here’s the lowdown on what’s been keeping me busy…

By now you know that the cob bed has been completely removed, but the wall has been replastered, and the floor redone as well. Just yesterday, I finished oiling the finish layer of the floor, so now it is curing. I can’t remember how long I waited last year for the oil to cure, but it must have been at least a week. Most of the past month of work on the house has been waiting – waiting for both layers of the floor to dry, for plaster to dry, for oil to cure. The actual work has been quite quick and simple. But we should finally be able to move back into the house very shortly.

The mud room is advancing. We’ve got one new door in place. It’s a pretty nice reclaimed solid wood door that I cut an arch into and fit into a modified door frame. We just finally got a knob on it. Once it’s oiled it’s gonna look really good. The cob wall of the mud room is at head height or higher, and we’ve got a nice triple-glazed (!) window sash buried in the wall above a couple of shoe shelves. This mud room is very shelf and hook-heavy for shoes, jackets, and other small items that frequently come in and out of the house. It’s not too far off from completion. I’m happy with this little addition so far.

As for the kitchen construction… we’ve been seriously slowed down recently because the truck in our vehicle co-op has been out of service. But last week, we finally got our fourth and final load of urbanite for the foundation, including a huge five foot long piece to use as a threshold for some French doors April and I picked up. Speaking of doors, damn are they expensive. We get our doors usually via donation, or at a place called Bayview Building Supply, which sells windows and doors that they get through big auctions. The doors are mostly all new, essentially, but they’re not sold as such. I don’t exactly know their story, but their doors are cheaper than new, but definitely not terribly cheap. I sure do have a hard time plunking down money for doors and windows, although they are an important investment… especially in this climate with our cold winters. I did talk about possibly building some doors earlier, but I decided against it.

To finish it off… I have some sad news. Recently, we destroyed the cob oven. Woe! It was a tough choice, but unfortunately the weather here has been incredibly wet (again) this year, and we’ve been having very scary and large amounts of surface runoff coming quite near to the foundation of the house. We wanted to dig a swale, and unfortunately, the oven was right in the path of where it need to be dug. So it had to go. The integrity of the foundation won over baked bread. Gah. Well, I guess it was always going to be a temporary thing, but I had at least hoped the oven would last a couple of years.

Well, that’s about all for now…

Building the First Course of the Urbanite Foundation [Kitchen]

ziggy — Fri, 21 May 2010 13:10:19 +0000

Last week, we set out to make some progress on stacking the urbanite foundation for our kitchen. There were a few things I learned from my own foundation, and a few things we wanted to do differently for this building. At first, we thought we’d want to dry stack the entire thing, but realized we would definitely benefit from some mortar, especially around the area where our giant posts will be sitting on the foundation.

I have not been super pleased with the clay/sand mortar I made for my own home, so I haven’t been pushing for a mud mortar. It wicks moisture big time and was a pretty big issue over winter and into the early spring — in those early days of spring, earthworms had managed to tunnel through the mortar into the house! (The mortar has since dried out. I think it was mostly wet from snow contact against the foundation over winter.)

Anyway, we decided we were willing to try a lime mortar, a 3:1 sand/lime mix to plug in areas around the foundation where posts will be set. I imagine we will end up mortaring most of the foundation, too. In this first course of urbanite, we made a chunky gravel/lime (3:1 gravel/lime mortar) mix to stuff cracks between pieces of concrete to fill the gaps.

We have been using some fairly giant pieces — our foundation is a whopping 24″ wide. So far, I’ve been pleased with how it’s progressed. Thankfully, we don’t have to completely worry about a level foundation. However, we are being careful to be level around those areas where the posts will sit, since we will have to create some kind of flat wooden sill for the posts to attach to.

I hope this lime mortar holds up a bit more sturdily than the mud mortar in my house. It will probably wick moisture as well (concrete wicks moisture, too, so it’s hard to avoid), but probably not as easily. The foundation will be three courses high, so we still have a ways to go!

Collecting Urbanite for the Kitchen Foundation

ziggy — Thu, 20 May 2010 21:47:30 +0000

In April, I went to gather urbanite for the kitchen foundation (which has finally been started as of last week!). Urbanite is, of course, reclaimed concrete from old roads and sidewalks.

I’ve collected and used urbanite for my home, but this time, walking in a giant yard brimming with the stuff, I got a decidedly post-industrial feeling about the whole thing. There was something sorta post-modern about the whole affair: scrambling over giant piles of rubble from dozens of demolition jobs, looking for the right size pieces of concrete to reuse in a completely different sort of building. I imagined that if I didn’t pick through this stuff, it would likely still be there the next year, and the next, and probably until well beyond my life or that of even our current capitalist, globalized society.

Concrete is, after all, pretty much completely non-biodegradable. And it is used absolutely everywhere: roads, walls, bridges, paths, houses, etc. The consumption of concrete is utterly massive: it’s the second most consumed material on earth, second only to water. That, I think, is absolutely horrifying. Concrete is here to stay. It’s not going to return to the earth anytime soon, like a fallen tree in the forest. That concrete block will look the same for hundreds (or thousands?) of years.

And then I realized why urbanite is a great symbol for the natural building movement: to take old concrete from roads and big buildings, those things that symbolize the achievements of our sprawling, ecologically destructive society, and to reuse them in natural homes, homes built by human hands, using other natural and recycled materials, is a brilliant thing. Literally, we can create a foundation from the waste of our larger, wasteful society. Hah!

Urbanite foundation (mostly) complete

ziggy — Thu, 15 May 2008 23:28:21 +0000

The foundation is now mostly complete with the addition of a third course on the west side of the building. The past few days have been spent trying to piece together that topmost course with the remaining urbanite, and stuffing additional nooks with a clay/sand mortar. The construction of the foundation has gotten funkier over time since we used all the nice flat pieces at the start, and all that was left for the third course was the irregular stuff.

The mortar mix is kinda tricky to work with because of its high sand content (about 3:1); it’s very gritty and difficult to jam into tight spaces. I’m glad now that there are only a handful of cracks remaining. But it sure does feel great not using any nasty new cement mix!

On Monday, I hope to get a delivery of sand to begin cobbing the walls. Look out!

Continuing work on urbanite foundation

ziggy — Tue, 13 May 2008 16:02:16 +0000

Progress on the cob house has been continuing at a good clip. The second course of the foundation has been laid out. We started to run out of larger pieces of urbanite, and fell back on medium and smaller pieces, which I thought to be less than ideal. Unfortunately, the majority of the urbanite I have collected is very irregularly shaped, so it’s trickier to work with than flat stuff. I think it will be fine, though.

We started to fill in the cracks between urbanite with more clay/sand mortar. Whenever there is rain in the forecast, I throw tarps over the entire foundation to prevent it from getting went. The mortar would probably just wash away if it got thoroughly soaked. But anyway, the purpose of the mortar is to prevent the passage of wind and rodents into the living space. Eventually, the interior face of the foundation will be cobbed over or plastered over to for extra protection.

Yesterday, my first work exchanger arrived. It will be fun to have new help around the work site.

On Friday, I hope to get sand delivered, because I expect cobbing will begin within another week… yeehaw!

First course of foundation complete

ziggy — Tue, 06 May 2008 22:56:37 +0000

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…

Building the urbanite foundation

ziggy — Fri, 02 May 2008 22:18:00 +0000

Two days ago, I went on a trip to collect urbanite (think broken up concrete from sidewalks and roadbeds) in a small town about twenty miles away. Thankfully, four willing folks offered their help in picking up the material. Urbanite is extremely heavy and you don’t want to move it more than you have to.

After an hour of collecting the concrete, we were physically exhausted. Unfortunately, we could not back up the pickup truck with trailer directly next to the huge pile — instead, it was about a twenty yard walk to the trailer, which made it that much more difficult. After unloading the urbanite at my work site, I was quite wiped out.

The next day, Jeff (my work exchanger) and I started assembling the concrete into the shape of the foundation wall, which is to be about 18″ thick. Working with the urbanite is almost like playing Tetris — you need to carefully find the right pieces to match up and fit together. Before starting, I thought I might have enough to finish the whole thing — boy, I was off. I didn’t even have enough to finish a single course:

So, it looks like I will have to make yet another exhausting trip.

Once the first course is laid out, I will make a clay/sand mortar at a ratio of four buckets of sand to one bucket of clay. This will fill the cracks between stones, preventing the entry of rodents, and blocking the passage of wind. Normally, one might use a cement mortar mix, but I am pretty opposed to using concrete in this building (unless it is recycled). (Fun fact: concrete is the second most consumed substance on earth, right behind water.) I hope the clay/sand mix will be sufficient.

If all goes well, I might start cobbing within a couple of weeks.

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