Three Weeks of Cobbing
That’s all it took to transform my rodent-infested garage into a nearly habitable part of my house. I have never cobbed so quickly or with such determination. The dry heat that’s been sitting on top of Texas certainly helped. You can only cob so fast in the winter. Your hands hurt, your eyes water, and the cob dries so slowly that adding too many layers too quickly produces that great cobbing no-no, “splooging,” wherein the top layer bulges over the edges of the layer beneath it. But during the summer when it’s hot you can get in a nice rhythm and just fly.
I only slowed down when I was debating how to incorporate the window. A wiser man would have built a frame for the window to sit in, but I just went ahead and embedded it into the cob. I connected both sides of the window to the wall of the house with wire that used to hold some of my straw bales together. This idea was first suggested to me by a drunk passing on the street. I ignored him, but then Jenny mentioned the same idea and, because she was sober at the time, that was enough to convince me that the window needed some more support. To shore up the integrity of the cob wall, I placed some long pieces of metal in it to act as rebar and I connected the wall to the house by hammering a bunch of old rusted nails to the house’s wooden frame. The nails give something for the cob to hold onto.
The real fun began when I started making little niches on the inside of the wall. These spaces will be great places to stick candles or pictures. I also embedded some glass jars into the very top of the wall, which will allow light to pass through. This is an easy and beautiful way to inject some natural lighting into a room without adding any heat from the sun.
Yes, I still need to plaster the wall—sadly, I haven’t even finished plastering the arch on my front porch yet—but once I do the wall should blend in almost perfectly with the rest of the house.
For those interested in checking out more detailed pictures of the project, you can click on this link.
Tags: Building with Cob, plaster, splooging
June 6th, 2008 at 1:33 pm
What happened to the self-sufficiency meter?
Sorry to hear about the zucchini.
June 6th, 2008 at 2:36 pm
Storms,
Where were you and your cobbing skills when the Cha brothers used to punch out all the walls in the frat house?
June 7th, 2008 at 11:31 am
If the self-sufficiency meter is absent, you can assume that there was no change. But it was an oversight not to include it after expanding the square footage of my house by 25% using only natural materials (and, of course, a fancy vinyl window I picked up at the Habitat for Humanity Restore for only $45. The completion of that project should have bumped the meter upwards a good five points.
Per the Cha brothers: cob, as hard as it gets when dry, could not have stopped their mighty fists. You can only do so much with it. I’m just happy to keep the opossums and potential thieves at bay.
June 11th, 2008 at 2:43 pm
I am really impressed and love the bottles.