In this week's episode,
we're going to take a tour of one extraordinary alternative home made of a
natural material called Cob.
What is Cob you ask? Don't worry. We're going to get into that.
The family that built and is now living in the home is going to give us a short
tutorial about how they built their own beautiful home with their hands and
feet. All right, guys, let's take a tour.
13, 14 years ago, we just stumbled upon a picture of a Cob house.
And ever since then, we were inspired to build our own someday.
And so we spent close to 10 years just dreaming and designing and drawing
and researching.
We have been living in this cob house for almost two
years. And prior to that,
we were living in our first Cob home that we built for approximately three
years. Our first house was definitely a practice.
We found a small piece of property that my parents lent us.
And so we built a small 350 square foot cob house on
their property,
just as an experiment and to stop having to pay rent every month.
And it was during that process that we realized that all we wanted to do was
natural building. So we started looking for our own property.
This house was quite the undertaking.
It took a little bit longer to build and it's much bigger.
It costs us between 15 and $20,000 to build this house,
which is somewhere between 700 and 800 square feet.
We are actually debt-free.
And that is because we were able to build this house out of pocket and we
didn't have any overhead on this house.
And while we were living in the tiny cob house,
we were able to pay for the property to build this house on.
I'm able to stay home and raise my daughter and not worry about daycare costs,
things like that. So it's been huge for us.
This is our cob bench that we're currently working on. So we thought we'd give.
A small demonstration of how you actually make Cob. Cob is really simple.
It's a old building technique.
It consists just of sand clay and straw.
You mix it into kind of like a putty and then you just build with it.
So you can do whatever here.
We've got a bucket of soil. Um,
it's just clay and sand,
and you want the ideal ratio to be about
20 to 30% clay, um,
to 70 to 80% sand. So here we just have a small amount.
And what we're going to do is what we're going to foot stomp it.
I'm just going to add some water to the dirt mix,
and then you're just going to kind of mix it together.
And you want to just get a really good mix of the clay and the
sand.
So what's happening is it's acting just like mortar and bricks and the sand
particles are getting evenly coated with clay,
and then they'll just bond together to create a good structure.
So if you have a lot of it,
you can use a tarp like what we've got here to mix it together by
flipping it. So you can see, you can just roll it over
and get it in a nice pile and then start squashin it.
Going to just start adding some straw.
And generally you want to use as long, uh,
of straw as you can get the longer, the better, because those fibers,
as you can see on the bench, sticking out,
they're going to cover more area and kind of bond it, knit it all together.
And here we've got some pretty good mix of cob.
So as your building with Cob You generally build up in layers like this.
When you're building a house like this,
you genuinely want to dampen the layer underneath it. This is just a bench.
So it doesn't really matter too much.
And it's going to get a final coat plaster all over it too.
So this bench, it took about a day to build and then a week or two to cure.
So you can see it's almost fully dry now. So it doesn't take a lot of time.
It is a little warmer out. So if you live in a wetter climate,
it'll take a little bit longer,
but about 24 hours and it should be good to put the next layer on.
So you can build pretty quickly building natural homes with my wife for about
seven years. Now,
this one is a straw bale cob house typically called a bale cob.
And we try to use as many natural building techniques as we possibly could.
The walls are comprised of straw bales,
which means that it is actually taking the load of the roof.
And then the insides have four to eight inches of cob as a thermal mass on
the interior.
This is our first year of garden here. You can see,
we have a lot of great pollinating plants growing.
We did thorough cement beds and that's typical for water
containing. It works extremely well for raised garden beds.
It takes minimal amounts of cement and you can get really natural curves with
them and just fill in whatever soil you want later.
The windows on the house, they're all recycled windows.
That was a huge cost saving for the home.
New windows are typically very expensive. And these ones,
we are able to salvage either from a recycling stores or
from the garbage dump.
Recycled materials is a really common practice in earth and building.
We have two bottles of wine that are put together and
created into a light tube. So when the sun strikes them,
it'll let a little bit of light in.
But the real thing that you're looking for is just artistic flair and the color
that you get on the inside here,
you can see more of the bottles that we chose to do.
This is on the opposite side of our shower. So when you're in the shower,
you can actually see the light coming through the bottles.
The plaster work is a technique that is developed by Athena Steen.
And she's a master plaster.
Who's been doing it for 30 plus years and it's done by putting
multiple colors down and letting them dry slowly,
and then carving back the layers to reveal the plaster underneath.
So this is kind of a nice feature of the house. It's looks like the foundation,
but it's really just a facade. The foundation is made of earth bags,
and we did like a double row of it to accommodate the thickness of our
walls. And then afterwards, we came back and we put these rocks,
which we dug up from Danny's parents' property.
They're kind enough to let us take some of their rocks.
Cob can be very sculptural.
Here's an example of where we just used after having built this entire wall,
coming back and using a sticky cob to sculpt on a design
and then plastering over it. And you can do this really at any stage of cobing,
whether it's, while you're first,
initially cobingor later on as an afterthought,
Welcome to the interior of the house.
You might feel like it looks bigger on the inside than the outside.
We get that a lot.
I think part of the reason is because we spent 10 years designing this house.
That's key.
When you're going into this is spend more drawing and planning than you would
building.
We use these main support beams here from our
property. They were a dead tree, two trees that had been beetle killed.
And so we just took those down in a strip, the bark off of them.
I'm lucky enough to have four siblings.
They all came up and we posted these all up just with human bodies,
Trying to build this wall as flat as we could,
because we knew in our other house, we were trying to fit, you know,
square kitchen counters onto a curved wall. It's not easy.
So we just had to do a few weird little angles with this butcher block to get it
to line up. Right. Another thing that's key for designing.
When you go to design a house is if you know where you want to put cupboards,
if you're building a straw bale or cob house,
you want wood that you can bury and stabilize in the wall that you could then
screw into later to hang things, put up your cupboards.
So sometimes with Cob,
it's hard to either find something that's recycled that you can upcycle
or buying something new and trying to fit it into a space that's already
created. So it's easier to actually just custom make some furniture,
which is what we did here in the kitchen.
We bought butcher block and just lumber, really in some plywood.
And we were able to build pretty good amount of storage for our kitchen.
Just with that,
we built these tall shelves to try to utilize the space we have going
up. My wonderful mother got me this beautiful sink. She said,
what's something that you wouldn't buy for yourself,
but that would look nice in your new home.
And so this is what I chose and I love it. Here.
We are in the living room or living space.
And majority of our furniture in this house is actually built out of cob
it's cheaper and it looks cool. Cob's a nice couch building material,
because if you have a curved wall like we did right here,
you don't have to try to fit modern, you know, flat back couches into a space.
That's kind of hard.
You just build your custom cob bench in whatever shape you want.
And you're good to go.
One of my favorite things about cob is the window sills that it creates its
depth is just beautiful.
This one shows exactly how thick our walls really are.
This is the truth window in our house.
It shows the truth of what's in the walls. You can see the straw bale.
I talked about back here,
and this is the thickness of the cob that's built up in front of the
straw bale. There's another,
probably four inches on the other side that helps sort of mortar the bales t
ogether like bricks.
Every struggle house should have a truth window just to prove that it really is
just a bunch of bales of straw.
This space is centered around a very important feature in a cold climate
like Montana. And that is the heat source.
This is a rocket mass heater, unlike most rocket mass heaters,
which feature a J style tube only small amounts of wood at a
time. This one actually has, uh, an opening that, uh,
could load, uh,
a full amount of wood into it and just be walked away from the fire still has
that sideways effect. It's going into the barrel.
And then as the gas is cooled,
they're going to drop down and run through this big long masonry bench here,
which is about two tons of masonry.
And then it's going to flow back up the chimney next to the barrel,
where the gas can kind of collect some heat off of the metal barrel
and then exit the house.
Nice thing about rocket mass heaters are they're highly efficient.
So the stoves are burning extremely clean and you're locking all of the
heat into the house.
So this stove burns at around 1200 degrees in the back of it.
But the temperatures going outside are under 200 degrees.
Well, key to the rocket mass heater.
We figured this out cause we put one of these in our first house and we ran into
a few problems where we didn't have enough clean outs.
So the clean-out is down there.
It's part of the exhaust system that has a little cap once a year,
take that off and you can clean out any Ash or whatever that might build up.
This wall is called a traum wall and it's actually solid
cob versus having bales in it. Uh,
it's not doing any insulating cause it's with inside the house and it's
positioned right in front of the big windows in the greenhouse.
So it takes on a lot of solar warmth and then slowly releases it.
So these walls here are extremely heavy and have just a lot of mass
in them.
This is what we call the greenhouse.
It's kind of like an entryway is where we try to get passive solar energy from
the sun through those big windows in here,
we did as well as the rest of the house. We did earth and floors.
They're also known as port Adobe floors and it's similar to
cob except that it's like a finer material. So instead of big pieces of straw,
it's chopped straw and sifted, clay, and sand,
so that it's a much finer material and you travel it and then you oil, it,
it hardens up and you can mop it just like any floor,
sweep it, vacuum it. loves to play on it.
You can roll cars on it. It's just great. Back here is the bathroom.
So we'd go check that out. It's a very small space,
but we figured why waste valuable space on it.
We did sort of a waterproof plaster here on the shower.
It's called Tadlack.
Composting toilet. It's a very simple, basic design. It's sawdust toilet.
Lyra can even use it with her compostable diapers.
We just throw them right in there. Those breakdown in the compost then as well.
I was lucky enough to have the room with the cob shelves because I don't do too
many of them in our first house.
I did them all over because it's so fun and easy and sculptural to do,
but when it comes to plastering them, it's very difficult.
Make sure even if it's easy and simple to do during the cobbing stage that you
understand that it might take you 10 times as long to plaster it,
but it's aesthetically turns out really nice. And I think worth,
at least to do a few.
One thing that happened with putting in our earth and floors was our mixture.
Just wasn't quite perfect in this room, whether that was,
it was too probably too wet.
And what happened was there was a crack that formed when it dried.
And that was okay because actually it gives you an opportunity to make it look
really neat.
You can fill it in with a different color material and kind of own it.
And it turns out looking almost like marbled.
So there's some good things that can come from mistakes. Alrighty.
So here we are in the second bedroom, which is bedroom.
I'd like to mention that some people might tell you when you're going to build a
house out of cob,
that it's going to be cheaper to build up versus out because you have the same
amount of foundation and roof. You have to keep in mind that building up.
You're going to be lifting all your materials twice as high.
It took a lot more time to lift materials up to that second level,
a better option might be something that maybe we would have done.
If we could go back in time would be to build with the plan to add an
addition later.
And if you just had like a window or a door or something that you knew later,
you'd knock out and have a second or third room that might be the better route
to take.
All right.
So now we're upstairs in the loft and this space we built to be either a future
bedroom or a guest bedroom or playroom.
I would say living in a cob house has simplified our lives even more than what
we were before. For one, just not having the mortgage.
It gives us a lot more financial simplicity and there's aspects of this
house that force you to just kind of take a step back and not be in such a
hurry. Living a simple lifestyle is definitely worth it.
It's not something that you can understand until you actually experience it.
Once fell in love with natural.
Living.
We wanted to educate as many people as possible and show them that alternatives
exist and are reachable.
You don't need to just do the things that everybody else is doing.
You can build your own home. Anyone can do it. You know,
there's things that a professional carpenter would have done a much better job
doing, but, but we did it and there are mistakes and we're done with it.
And we have a place that we live in now. And every time we think about that,
it's an amazing accomplishment.
Thanks for watching this week's episode.
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with your friends. And I will see you next week with an all new video.