I’ve been enjoying the latest newsletter articles by Coenraad Rogmans over at House Alive!. In the article, Building with Sand, Straw and Clay, Coenraad talks about the many variations of the magical mixture of these ingredients. There is a spectrum of ratios that create different variations of these base materials. Including cob, light clay, wattle and daub, bale walls, bale cob, earthen floors, plasters, renders, and paints . Within each application one would use a different ratio for a particular result. Say for instance you are working on a cob wall with built in niches. Ianto Evans teaches about corbel cobs. Cob with long stocks of straw for added tensile strength. Another is light clay, a mixture of straw tossed like a salad with the dressing being clay slip, or watered down clay. Or for an earthen oven a sand clay mixture. You can see how versatile it can be!
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Radon is a naturally occurring, colorless, odorless gas that comes from the soil of the earth. It’s a radioactive noble gas that is formed from the decay of radium. Homes can have high concentrations of Radon, creating a unhealthy air quality. In fact it’s the the number 2 cause of lung cancer in the U.S. If your thinking about new construction plan in installing a Radon mitigation system. It’s relatively inexpensive and easy to do. I’ve discovered a great resource on the EPA website about Building Radon Out [ PDF 5.5 MB], a how-to for contractors or DIY’s. Though I didn’t see a section on earthen floors and radon mitigation it does cover other types of flooring systems.
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Kindra Welch, a cob builder and designer, posted the the construction process of a cob house built for Jennifer Fruth and Robert Brown. It’s located in Lockhart, Texas about 30 miles from Austin.
What an awe-inspiring house. The quality and attention to detail really shows. The interior sculpting is delightful. The process shows the use of a bobcat for loading wet cob to where it needs to be. That must be nice! In the end, the entire cob house was lime rendered on the exterior.
Nice work! Continue…

Anne and Gord Baird are building a Cob Dreamhome in Victoria. It’s the first code approved, high occupancy seismically engineered load bearing cob building in Canada. It’s a 1550 round feet building with solar PV and wind power, grid intertie, solar thermal heating, rain water harvesting from a living roof, composting toilet, grey water re-use, and passive solar design.

They have insulated their cob walls by adding pumice, a porous volcanic rock. So their cob mix was clay/sand, pumice and straw. I just love that they are running hydronic heating tubes through the earthen floors and benches. This is a great example of a cob demonstration home. I’m sure we will be hearing more about this project in times to come.

Here is a must see photo gallery of the building process.
For more information about this project and Eco-sense services visit eco-sense.ca.

Aime Desponds created an amazing casa de barro, or mud house, at his rancho Mogorcito. The process is well documented at his website cobinbaja.blogspot.com.
View the entire building process here »

Aime Desponds was born in Lausanne, Switzerland in 1940. After graduating from mechanical engineering in the 1960s, he traveled to mexico where he worked at his uncle’s restaurant. Since 1985, Aime worked as a chef at a restaurant in Santa Ana, California until his retirement in 2005.

Aime was seeking a new twist in his life, and in 1992 he found out that while enjoying the culinary art, he also wanted to be involved in drawing and painting. He then enrolled in art classes in some community colleges in Orange County. It was in looking for information on how to build a clay oven, that he discovered natural construction. In 2003 he took a cob workshop with Linda and Ianto Evans in the Santa Barbara mountains. The contact with mud as a building material and a sculptable matter was an amazing discovery that would affect his life forever.

As he plunged his bare hands and feet into the mud, he felt instantly connected with nature. He knew that this fantastic discovery would fit perfectly with his way of thinking and his artful soul. Thus, he decided to build himself a cob house.