In August, I had a chance to sling some mud over at Kindra’s Mountain Cottage.  This beautiful, 1200 square foot, fully permitted cob house is tucked away in the mountains of Black Lake, in northern New Mexico. It’s constructed from locally harvested round wood, straw bale, cob, and adobe.  It’s a passive solar design with radiant ( earthen ) floor heating and a living roof.  The quality is magnificent, like we have come to expect from Kindra’s work.  Though the cottage is a bit of a family art project, with most of the labor provided by Kindra, her family and friends.

When I arrived, the work party was applying the exterior render to the walls.  A mix of 2 red clay, 1 lime, 3 course sand, 3 fine sand and some chopped straw.  Then washed with a color coat while still wet.

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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.
Continue Reading…

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 Reading…

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.

While visiting Cob Projects, I found a link to Stephen Hren’s article in Home Power Magazine ( A Hand Built Home – From the Ground Up – download PDF article ).

Stephen Hren and his wife Rebekah built their cob home in the Piedmont region of North Carolina, about 30 miles north of Duram. What amazes me about this project is that it’s completely up to code and it’s cost is so little. The construction cost for the house was $10,950. Affordable? Yes. Later additions of a solar PV system, driveway, septic and well adds another $9,200. $20,150 is very affordable even for the most modest-of-means among us.

Labor, around 2000 hours of it, was not included in the ( monetary) cost. Stephen, Rebekah and their friends traded sweat equity instead of money. Which at $20 an hour, a basic skilled laborer wage, totals $40,000.

Their inspector allowed them to use Pima County, Arizona, building codes that detail “monolithic adobe”. Mark down another code-accredited cob home for the records!

I find it very exciting that cob is finding it’s way into the mainstream of modern housing. Much appreciation goes out to those trailblazers that are working twords building ecologically friendly, inexpensive, monolithic adobe homes.