cob house

[TNJed]

I'd like to introduce most of you to a new form of building I recently stumbled upon. Ok, new to America but centuries old elsewhere.

I am always visiting the website of The Farm to get ideas on permaculture and other sustainable ideas. I saw one of their workshops included instruction on building a house with cob.

I had never heard of cob. A few googles and youtube videos later and I'm a fan. Come to find out, there are nearly a million homes and pubs in the UK made from cob. Those classic white plastered homes with thatch roofs? That's cob. Those structures have also been around for hundreds of years. Hundreds of years.

It's a mix of clay, sand and straw mixed together to make 2 foot thick walls which due to their mass are fantasic at passive solar heating/cooling. The ingrediants are readily available, it's VERY cheap, you can actually build it yourself with friends, and you can design and sculpt your own home.

It's similar to adobe but cob is a monolithic structure and not limited to linear lines. You can build your own home as nice as your wallet allows or as Dr. Seuss and humble as you'd like. Obviously, the more money you invest the more modern it can be but there are stories of people building their own cottage for $1k-$10k.

Cob is very new to North America and is becoming popular in the northwest areas of Oregon, Washington and British Columbia.

This is about as green as it gets. The biggest and only caveat I can find are building codes. Depending upon your region of the country and the willingness for your inspector to learn and help, is what makes or breaks plans.



Here are some decent links to get you started.

http://www.cobcottage.com/

http://www.barefootbuilder.com/ (has a studio built in Gulf Breeze which survived hurricanes Dennis and Ivan very well.)

http://www.cobprojects.info/

YouTube - Meka's Cob Cottage
A video of a very cute cob cottage

YouTube - Cob documentary teaser
Cob Documentary Teaser



P.S. I'm not at all proposing this as a building model for 30A. LOL I just would like to introduce people to it and get their imaginations going. I look around and think our culture isn't short of resources but imagination. Also, cob fits into a deep seeded philosophy of mine; There isn't anything we need which nature hasn't already perfected.

Looking forward to hearing any and all comments. If by some miracle one of you is building a cob structure, let me know. You just got a volunteer.

 

[aggieb]

i could totally live in one of these, especially the one with the fireplace, the one with the red living room, or the one with the swanky terrace, in the second video. i'm not real sure about the one that looks like an outhouse.

 

[TNJed]

i could totally live in one of these, especially the one with the fireplace, the one with the red living room, or the one with the swanky terrace, in the second video. i'm not real sure about the one that looks like an outhouse.

Glad you liked them and I agree about not wanting to live in the compost toilet.

How about this one?

 

[AAbsolute]

A couple years ago the insurance industry got legislation passed in Florida. That legislation developed a Florida Product Approval Sheet. Only materials and products that are on said sheet are approved. I don't think anyone is going to pay the bill for this to go through the product approval process. Thanks Big Government.

 

[TNJed]

A couple years ago the insurance industry got legislation passed in Florida. That legislation developed a Florida Product Approval Sheet. Only materials and products that are on said sheet are approved. I don't think anyone is going to pay the bill for this to go through the product approval process. Thanks Big Government.

Exactly.

Lobbyists protecting the building industry which protects the insurance industry and round the hampster wheel we go. Codes are good but limiting products is greedy not to mention unAmerican. I honestly don't know what American means these days.

It just wouldn't do for them if someone could build a home for under $30k and have it paid off in a year. 30 years or even 15 to pay for shelter is ridiculous.

The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.

 

[scooterbug44]

There are a lot of cool "green building" methods that have been around for hundreds of years, but that you can't do because of codes.

I am a big fan of haybale construction (though not for Florida due to mold). It's like building w/ Legos and so funn!

 

[Matt J]

Exactly.

Lobbyists protecting the building industry which protects the insurance industry and round the hampster wheel we go. Codes are good but limiting products is greedy not to mention unAmerican. I honestly don't know what American means these days.

It just wouldn't do for them if someone could build a home for under $30k and have it paid off in a year. 30 years or even 15 to pay for shelter is ridiculous.

The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.

Seems like all the big government stuff isn't all that bad in this case.

http://www.barefootbuilder.com/pics.htm
http://www.greenhomebuilding.com/QandA/cob/where.htm

There's even a class you can take over in Pensacola.

http://naturalhomes.org/learning-cob.htm

Now I do agree that this isn't a building type I would use for gulf front or close to gulf front, but North of 98 and out of a flood zone you'd probably be fine. If you really do it let me know, I think it would be funn to help for a day.