Natural Villages

About cob, or earth based houses

NOTE: Many of the pictures shown on this page and throughout the Natural Villages website were borrowed from other websites and from at least one book – The Hand-Sculpted House. We have deep gratitude for the construction team and house designers who have built one or more of those pictured here.

Some of these artists and photographers include: Sunray Kelly, Elke Cole, Nancy Chase, Becky Bee, Eric Hoel, Ianto Evans, Linda Smiley, Michael Smith…to name just a few…

We urge you to query any search engine with “cob house” or “cob building” or “cob construction”. You’ll see the same pictures, with some really heartwarming stories by people about their houses that they literally slapped and kneaded into shape.

We want to acknowledge Lois Lewis, our dear 70 year old friend who did it ALL BY herself, (over a few years, a 30 ft in diameter home!!!) with only help on the roof from her sons…Lois says : “if I can do it, ANYONE can!”

“Cob” refers to a mixture of clay soil, sand, water and straw, which is well blended in rather arbitrary proportions (dictated by the clay content of the soil) and used to form a structure. “Cob” means “gob”, more or less. “Monolitic Adobe” describes its rock-like mass. Many mix with barefeet, others with boots, others with cement mixers, horses and, you get the picture…

“Adobe” is a term with which you may be more familiar. Adobe is made of the same materials, but it is pressed wet into forms and allowed to bake into bricks in the sun. The structure is then constructed of the bricks, usually with a coat of plaster applied inside and out to finish it. Brick construction has been shown to be more likely to fall apart in earth quakes. With cob construction, or “monolithic adobe”, the whole structure (walls, at least) becomes like a giant adobe brick.

It is possible that mud was among the very first “permanent” construction materials. Cob buildings are standing today, still useable, that were built over 1000 years ago. Cob buildings in England have been continuously inhabited for over 500 years. There is a 10-story cob apartment building in Yemen, that has been continuously occupied for at least 900 years. (see hand sculpted house for photo)

A cob house is usually built in the following manner:

1. A trench, about three feet wide, is dug three or more feet deep (far enough to allow the base of the foundation to sit below the frost line). The trench is filled with rock or “deconstructed” concrete or some similar material. The foundation wall is usually extended at least a foot above the ground level.
2. Cob is applied directly to the foundation wall, and is built upwards, to whatever level the builder wants to place the roof eave. Anchors for doors and roof can be embedded in the cob walls; openings are left for doors. Windows are usually built into the walls as they go up, with lintels embedded above the windows for load-bearing. If careful planning is applied to wallmass, large poles bound into massive earth walls can hold a roof in the fiercest of winds, while promoting cool in the warmest times.
3. Any of a variety of roof styles can be utilized.
4. The walls are plastered, usually with a strawless mixture of clay, sand and lime. Often elements such as egg, flour, milk and other natural elements will appear as favorite indoor or outdoor wall protection recipes.
5. Plumbing, heating, electrical lines and appliances can easily be accommodated, either by building them into the plans and construction, or adding them later.

Advantages of cob construction.

1. Most materials can be had free of charge, provided the owner or builder is willing and able to scrounge, which requires a truck. Dirt is usually free; it is rare that good cobbing soil can not be found near a building site. Foundation material is readily available; slabs of broken driveways and concrete floors, urbanite, or broken cement pieces are ideal – and found anywhere in a city or town where a building, basement or sidewalk is being razed . Sometimes we can be paid for hauling away these cement pieces. Making piles of collected broken cement chunks can be a huge service to any community seeking to build many of these homes.

Windows from a building in deconstruction are great, as are windows from junk cars. Car and truck windsheilds make ideal livingroom portals. We can get sheets of aluminum from the sides of old trailers, and sometimes sheets of 3/4 inch and other thicknesses of plywood can be pulled up from old trailer floors, and used for roofs. Roofing material is anything that will keep out the rain, really. Earth roofs of rubber pond liner, plywood, cardboard, old rugs and soil are more environmentally interconnected and often used to create the garden or earth roof seen in some of our photos…

Some suggest high tornado winds and big weather flows will respect the house as a hill within the elements and be less likely to explode or blow apart if built in the round, with an earthen or hill like roof.

2. A builder, usually the owner, has nearly unlimited creative license in everything from dimension and shape to the tiniest details within and without a cob house.

3. They are naturally energy-efficient to cool and heat, provided the builder takes care to insulate the ceiling, and attend to solar positioning advantages. Straw bales embedded into north walls make this more true. Heat tends to pass out through north facing walls. Straw bales tend to keep this heat in, better that only earth, which is more pourous for air passage.

4. It is indescribably satisfying to build your own house without using materials that harm you, your neighbors, or some people or animals on the other side of the world, either from obtaining them or from their effects after manufacture such as the gassing off of rugs, fabrics and paints.

Disadvantages

1. Its time consuming. Its labor-intensive. 1a. But less than you might think. 2. It makes the need for community obvious, while demonstrating our inherent unified power. A large family group can erect a small family home in a similar amount of time it takes for a modern construction company, only the materials and approach are different. About three months, on average.

Frequently asked questions about zoning and permitting processes.

Emerging artists flourish in these environments.

Buy The Hand-Sculpted House and The Cob Builders Handbook

Inquire about cob construction on a search engine.

This article is good for those not familiar with this building process, and it is good for folks who have land and need basic information about what is involved with building from earth. It is written for folks who live on or near Pine Ridge, reservation.

It also says thanks to those folks last year (2003), and this year for all the help and hard work. The first article described the project and sustainable community development possibilities of earth home building in general.

HOW TO BUILD A BEAUTIFUL (ALMOST) FREE HOUSE

(and where to go for recycled and natural materials)

by Johanna Parry Cougar

Okay, are you ready to build yourself a home that could last say, 1,000 years? The first thing you need is a place to put it. Then you could build a little one to work out the details of your big one. If you let one inch represent one foot, you can build a little mud house with little rocks that represent the foundation. You can add mud formed furniture and stairs, anything you want in your big house. You can use sticks and squares of cardboard sized like plywood to work out your roof system. The earth out here seems to have plenty of clay in it mostly… so just get dirt and add water for this part. Mix it like making bread dough, adding enough water to shape it like clay. Usually it is good to add some sand It makes it stronger.

Then, you need a few tools. A shovel will be needed to dig the foundation trench, especially if you have no access to a back hoe or something more practical.

Some of you read the article about Leola One Feather’s earth house before. Our project taught us many things about where to get all the materials we needed. We didn’t have anything bigger than a shovel at Leola’s. While Leola’s boys, Shcope and Nupa completed about half the trench, digging by hand in a day, the ladies worked steadily in the heat and rain, especially Dawn, and sure enough we completed the rest of the digging and rock hauling in about two weeks.

The team of ladies came from London, California, and Colorado. Then more friends from Michigan, a friend from New York and a couple from Ohio. These folks helped haul rocks, fill the trench with rubble, transport big cement chunks and gravel to smoothe the surface in preparation for the foundation wall. We made many journeys to get broken cement chunks… these work the best for a foundation. Since earthquakes aren’t common out here, nice flat cement chunks dry stack into a foundation wall incredibly well. The sheer weight of massive three foot thick walls one or two stories high, that are dry and heavy like rock make it next to impossible for a sound foundation to move under this weight. Altho  at first it might settle some.

Cement chunks are found in any reconstruction site. Often the construction company has to pay someone to haul them to the dump. A person with a truck, and a phone, could make a deal with a reconstruction group and find out where locally any of the cement projects are being torn out. Maybe you can get paid for hauling them away to your house site. If not, I have seen amazing square rocks out near the Brainerd Indian School. Your foundation rocks need to be very flat on at least two sides. Squarish rocks are ideal because they fit together in a very stable, beautiful way. Experiment. Your eyes and senses wont lie about how safe your foundation is or isn’t.

Last summer a foundation expert named Ram Sharan came out and showed me carefully how to align the rocks so the face of the inside and outside looks even and nice, then like a jigsaw puzzle we fill in the center with rocks carefully keeping the wall shape, filling in between the gaps with rubble and little rocks. It went up almost two feet high, to make sure the earth wall doesn’t get water and snow splashing up on the base of it. It is three feet wide, so the walls are nice and thick against the intense winter winds and sleet.

We were really, really grateful for the friends who showed up to work. For their sweat in the sun and strained rock hauling backs, folks trickled out from different places and helped along with Percy, Leola’s boys Dad, who was lending support with loaning trailers, tools, and helping locate gravel piles. Elmer Bear Eagle, Leola’s cousin, was definitely our hero out there. He knew not only where to borrow a truck or find good sand, he was a genius at keeping the campsite tarps from blowing away in the storms.

Elmer and I really talked through the roof system several times, to be sure we could design one that didn’t cost more than we had. We realized that every abandoned trailer out there has a floor full of ¾ inch plywood sheets that are perfect for roofing. And that in a pinch, if we had to, we could pull sheets of aluminum off those old trailers,  and use them as roof sheeting.(Be sure you get permission before gleening up an old trailer site for someone).

 I learned that how you lay the roof tiles makes all the difference.

Being sure to lay them so they overlap from the top of the roof slant down, to shed any water that lands on them. When you design your roof you really need to think carefully about all the different ways water can trickle under it. Earth walls don’t want to get too wet, so your roof overhang has to be two feet long to keep driving rain off them.

In this climate the trench needs to go just deeper than frost level. We dug ours three feet down, and almost three feet across. Then, we used the dirt to make the mix for the walls.

Freda Yellow Hair was our cheerleader. She faithfully supported us by fielding phone calls, helping track down lost friends trying to find the camp, and hung out with us and chatted while we all worked away on the house model and foundation. It might have been my deep love for Freda that got me back out here. I want her to have a house, too but she can’t get her land traded in a way that gives her a home here, in Wounded Knee, where she belongs.

So mixing where we worked meant a good load was made from three five gallon plastic buckets filled with earth, to one bucket of sand, one big stack of dried prarie grass, and water added as needed until, mixing this on a tarp with your feet, you get it to fold over like bread dough or a full tortilla. I like to thank my mother the earth, when I am doing this. And when I hold the earth in my hands while making the wall, I like to pray for happiness within the walls, and the love of creator to permeate the hearts of the family within them. For them to know no suffering.

What folks don’t always know is you don’t need to buy straw for your earth wall mix, if you rake the grass, and use really dry long and short grasses, stuffing as much as possible into every single batch. This straw, or prarie grass is a big part of the insulation of the wall.

Out here, it is a great idea to have straw bales on your coldest north wall. You can mortar them in place with your earth mix, being careful to stab the bales with sharp sticks sticking out all over, to hold the inside of the earth mix, and hold the bale stable inside the wall. This would be one cost to the house. Bales for about five bucks apiece, needing, maybe 24 to 30 for the whole north wall…about $150 at the most.

Now windows; the best I’ve seen out there are the windshields front and back of the old cars. Thick and nicely curved makes a big broad view, and the three foot thick walls give a window sill to sit in. When you place them long, tall ends up and down, they are really gorgeous.

You just plaster them in place with the earth mix that dries like rock around it. If it breaks, you get a hatchet, and clean out the broken glass, carve away the dry dirt around the window, make a new batch of earth, add what crumbled off, and place a new one in. It takes less time than a traditional house window, and if the window is free, so is putting it in.

It’s a good idea to put a lintel, board or a length wise log above every window and door, to spread the mass of the earth weight and wall above it, especially if your house is two stories.

If you make your doorway frames from hand stripped and sawed poles or logs, you can nail them into your doorways by placing a small stump, with a short root system embedded into the earth wall, and the stump carefully place to be exposed wood, right where you want to nail or screw your doorframe to the earth wall. Don’t forget to adequately season your lumber if you cut it on your own land, so shrinking doesn’t cause problems later. But if it does, just go caulx the cracks in with more mix and plaster…

Use the earth mix to fill in any cracks between the wood and the earth. Don’t worry, everything can be fixed up to look better no matter how bad you screw up. Remember, the interior walls can all be painted with a natural gypsum white plaster. Clean, and beautiful.  Other colors too. The outside can be painted if you don’t like the earth finish look. But only with natural (and usually free) paints and plasters made of things like flour, egg whites, lime, gypsum, chalk, charcoal, etc…the traditional chemical paints make the walls sweat and not breathe and they will grow molds and corrode them. A healthy earth home smells like you are outside whether it is warm or cool inside.

So the stump is embedded so only the wood of the stump is seen, the rest holds it inside the wall. No way you can pull this out after the wall is dry. So use this root method, or build a wood box, and leave the smooth wood exposed on one side and embed the rest of the box into the earth wall, this makes it with lumber if you don’t have stumps to use. Do this at the very top of your wall to fasten the roof system on to the walls, too. Leola wants an earth or sod roof for her house. My friend Nancy gave me the simplest recipe for this:  Build up the walls to slant the roof down in the back. Fasten stripped poles lengthwise from front wall to the back wall, nailing them down on the wood exposed in the upper walls. Be sure you flatten your poles with a chainsaw, or have them milled to flat on both sides of the poles.

Then nail the ¾ inch plywood sheets you harvested down onto the poles for a very flat roof that slants down in back. This style is called a shed roof. Now, here is where money and trust come in…the tar and roof sealants are really toxic and expensive, especially the best quality roof sealants and glues. If you can seal with a safe cheap elmers glue, provided it stays dry under the plastic, it costs only $20 a gallon, and can be used in all the edges, cracks, and seams where all the plywood is nailed and fitted together. Then put the heaviest mil plastic you can get over the glue, gluing it down to the plywood, careful to seal plastic edges with the upper lip going down over the top of the piece under it, on the downhill slant for water repelling with no leaks. Then place plastic and/or pond liner on top of the plywood, (Hopefully you already built up a four inch lip around the edge of the roof), and after the liner goes in, then you can throw a layer of old cardboard, a layer of old carpets, try looking at the dump for these, then throw three inches or more of soil up there and grow something drought resistant and useful, like red clover. So it’s like making a pond of your roof, but filling with dirt, and carpets and cardboard, not water.

Make good drains and downspouts on this roof. Especially off the back. Dig a French drain around the underside of your roof overhang to draw the water away from your foundation.

To make fire and rodent proof insulation to stuff tight under this roof, between your ceiling of the house, and the under of the roof, stuff old or donated clothes that have been first soaked in heavy clay/earth solution, then dried to hard in the sun. Rodents can’t eat clay, and fire can’t burn it. Stuff lots of it in there…you need really good insulation in your roof. Some people use clay soaked straw or dry grass, but this is riskier if not well coated, it can burn. Some people take sheets, soak them in heavy clay, dry them to stiff, and paint them with natural colors for wall dividers and ceiling materials.

I know folks that have built a 400 square foot, one and a half story home that will last their family hundreds of years, for about five hundred dollars, taking about three to four people maybe three or four months start to finish. This method above would cost less, and take less time, depending on how big the house footage is because you spent nothing on windows, walls or lumber.

You can plan for wiring and plumbing using common sense. Remember to put your woodstove pipe through the earth wall, you can coil the clay earth into stovepipe going up or inside a wall, too. Earth fireplaces and stoves can be awesome.

If you go to any public or college library, you can go a computer, and go to:  www.emeraldearth.org    :  www.pachamama.org  :  www.real.com/welcome/index.html  : www.ecobusinesslinks.com/sustainablecommunities.hml   : www.wattlehollow.com/cobsite.html   :  www.kleiwerks.com

This will take you to other earth builders, houses, communities and villages

So there you have it. One more thing. I really wanted to thank Elmer for all the laughing, working, sweating and caring.