Cob: Real information

[Shannon C. Dealy]

On Tue, 20 Jul 1999 HandyM2 at aol.com wrote:

> In a message dated 7/20/99 1:44:12 AM Eastern Daylight Time, 
> dealy at deatech.com writes:
> 
> << As far as living in cob
>  houses, I don't but several of my friends either live in them, or have cob
>  studios or accessory buildings that they use on a daily basis.  
> 
> In California?  I think I have seen most of these in various photo shoots and 
> such.  Very Artistic stuff.

Actually, Oregon & Washington mostly.

> I do have a small experimental structure underway which you can visit if you 
> are in
>  Oregon, but I am not sure how interesting you will find a building with an
>  80 square foot interior and walls that are currently three to four feet
>  high (though at least they have started getting taller again :-) >>
> 
> So have you kept any records as to how much time and effort was used in this 
> smallish structure?  Is it to be used as a Garden Shed perhaps?  
[snip]

As far as my structure, it is intended as a tool shed, and place to change
my clothes/get out of the weather, since I live 30+ miles from the
property and am tired of the mud in my car.  The experimental aspect of
the building is that I have setup some rules in order to show what can be
done without any money or other significant resources.  The question I am
most commonly asked is "how much does it cost?", this is the $0.00/square 
foot building.  The rules I am using for this building are:

     1 - All materials in the building must come from the site (this has
         resulted in a very high clay cob mix with grass and other plants
         for the fiber)
     2 - All tools used in the construction of the building must
         either: a) Not have been necessary in order to perform the
         desired function (in other words the tool was used for
         convenience only), or b) It must be possible to improvise a
         suitable replacement for the tool from the materials at the
         site.
     3 - For the time being I am allowing myself to violate rule one
         with regard to glass for the windows, since I don't have time
         to try to make glass from scratch right now, I am allowing for
         a zero cost substitution of glass jars from the recycling bin
         set into a cob matrix.

The idea here is that following these rules, it should be possible for a
person to walk onto a piece of land with similar resources, and with
nothing but their bare hands and tools improvised on the site, build this
building.

As far as keeping records, I started to, and even took photos of each
stage, unfortunately, the camera developed a problem and destroyed all of
the photos of the foundation work.  Then to complicate things, a couple
thousand trees I had planted on the land started dying due to a drought we
had last year, so I started spending most of my time watering trees, and
pretty soon the numbers I had were meaningless.  They would not have been
that helpful anyway, since my physical condition has improved greatly
over the last year, but I have a bad back, so some days I work much
faster than others.  In addition, much of the cob work so far was done
last fall in the rain which slowed the process down.  At best guess, if I
just lived on the site and built during good weather (rather than going
out for a few hours once or twice each week), the cob portion of the walls
could have been done from start to finish in about one week.  The
foundation work probably was more like two weeks, since digging up and
moving some of the larger rocks took alot of time.  The roof which will be
thatch will probably be more work than the rest of the building combined,
since it will take alot of grass and alot of preparation work.

Shannon C. Dealy      |                    DeaTech Research Inc.
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