Cob: Using Bricks While Building With Cob

[Robert Waldrop]

Being in Oklahoma City, I have been following this thread with
interest as I think this is the closest cob building project to
Oklahoma City that I have heard about.  I have no experience with cob,
only what I've read, but I have a thought about your wood burning
stove and the trailer house.  You are right to be concerend about
fire, but a wood burning stove can be safely installed in a trailer
house, and I know many people who heat with wood and live in mobile
homesand have doneso for many years.  The thing is that as with any
wood stove installation, it must be done safely.  In particular, the
triple walled stove pipe must be used to go through the ceiling/roof,
it must be a sufficient distance from the wall or fireboard or brick
has to be used on the wall to protect it, and it should sit on a layer
of bricks.

I am also interested in your project because it is a true bootstrap
project, we don't have much money ourselves and all the people we work
with are in similar situations and we are very interested in low cost
do it yourself building projects.

I could also recommend a couple of listservs of regional interest,
Okie straw bales at yahoo groups, and retrofit, also at yahoo groups,
which is about retrofitting trailer houses in a more sustainable
direction, including wrapping them in strawbales and putting better
roofs on them.   The retrofit idea is interesting to me because a lot
of people in this part of the country live in trailer houses, and by
wrapping them in strawbales and putting in a better roof, they become
a much more comfortable and energy efficient dwelling, and you don't
have to hire the work like plumbing and electrical done because it is
already there in the trailer house core.

I think that you are right that strawbale is more expensive than cob
for a do it yourself project building an entire house from scratch
project, however.  In the meantime, we will send warm thoughts and
prayers your way.  We have an old house in OKC that we are working to
retrofit with super insulation, but in the meantime, we keep warm with
two small propane heaters and believe me they are not central heat and
with our lack of insulation, it gets pretty nippy in here when we turn
them off at night.  We make insulating curtains for our windows (using
two layers of blankets with a layer of mylar in between, aluminum foil
would also work), and it's so cold this morning I'm thinking, "we
should hang blankets over the walls too".

Robert Waldrop, http://www.bettertimesinfo.org
Oscar Romero Catholic Worker House


-----Original Message-----
From: Kim West <kwest at arkansas.net>
Hi Linda. I'm building in south Arkansas. I believe that cob is
cheaper than strawbale, but of course I may be wrong. It wouldn't be
the first time! LOL! Building with cob, and recycling everything
possible from our present place, all I have to buy is the straw, the
wood, and the shingles. Everything to make the cob is in abundance
right under my feet, including water coming from a spring. So far I
have figured it will cost me nearly $1600 in wood. That is using
treated wood which I'd really rather not use, but I do want this place
to last as long as possible. As I said, I had to "come down a
thousand" when I realized the cost of having to buy materials. At this
point in time I have come down to a 16'X16' interior with a second
story. This would give my children and me 512 sf of living space,
which is almost half what we have now, but will be a much better home
for us. Right now I am sitting here freezing my tail off cause the
Thermogas man refuses to take a postdated check [postdated for 7 days]
for some butane/propane. What is so ironic about this is that out in
my shed I have a wood stove that, if I did not live in a mobile home,
I could be using to cook and heat this place at this very moment. I
refuse to set it up in a mobile home because it is not a saf thing to
do. I figure we would fare better in the cold than in a fire, eh? LOL!
Oh well, the wood stove WILL do it's thing once again once we get our
new place up!