Building your house and being organized

[Kat Morrow]

> For example  always keep a pit of cob ready so you can for even an hour
>or two a day.   I feel the cob  works best when it has had a chance to sit
>for >a bit before being worked. I work at home and often will only have an
>hour or >two that I can put into the  house. If my  building material is
>prepared in
>advance then I can go down an load up the old  wheel barrel  and work for an
>hour or two.
>
>Regardless, you will need to be even more
>organized in this case.  When working with a crew of folks you need
>to put some folks to work just making sure that the folks who are
>building have everything they need. (keep that cob a coming). Maybe
>you need to keep two pits going, one to work from and one soaking and
>getting  ready.

Just a quick note on pit mixing of cob, it is a great way to have
quantities of cob ready for building and can be mixed easily by one
person/pit.

Working on a house in CO last summer we developed a two pit cob system
using strawbales and tarps.  The 2 pits were adjacent and next to our piles
of clay and sand.  We would sifted material for plaster and throw the
"chunks into the pit.)  The walls of the 'pit' were of strawbales, then a
tarp was laid down and a 4x4 piece of plywood laid on top of the tarp.  The
dry quantities of clay, sand and manure were shoveled in and mixed dry,
then one can hold the hose and start wetting down the mix while alternating
dancing and using a shovel or garden fork to turn the mix.  I would get the
mix really mushy then added as much straw as I could, the straw just keeps
going down for a while and when it no longer seemed to be disappearing,
then I figured I had enough (you how these high tech measurements go.....).
The mix would still be mushy but always firmed up in the following days as
it matured.

Then, I would then fold the edges of the tarp over the pit and use the cob
out of the adjacent pit.  If we (there were usually 2 of us cobbing) were
really jamming, we would go through a pit in a day so the mixes were
getting a minimum of 36 hours 'maturing' time.  The cob was definitly
better if it sat a while.  If one has a good crew going on wall raising you
would probably need bigger or more pits.

Experiment and the perfect system for your site will evolve.  I liked this
method as we always had cob ready and we used only 2 large tarps for about
8 months worth of cob mixing.  The tarps are probably still okay for some
uses as we limited the damage by lining the pits with wood, oh yeah, we
also put a couple of 1x6 boards up against at least 2 of the sides to
shovel against.

Kat

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