[Cob] foundation

[Amanda Peck]

Charmaine's right, it might make sense if you did pour your stemwall.  
Depending on how much rain you get, it might need to be a bit taller, inside 
and out, than Owens' (the one in the DVD).

Yep, building stone walls is an art.  You either love it or hate it, and 
people who love it can't be hurried.  As long as the urbanite doesn't have 
rebar in it (much preferred!) you may be able to score and break it.  Some 
kinds of stone can be shaped more easily than others.  Roughly is fine, as 
long as you don't make little columns of stones, and you DO have big jobs 
spanning the width of the wall fairly frequently.

Or use SLIPFORM STONE WALLS the way the Nearings did.

You might look at a book on stone walls.  There are lots of them.

Or, what the heck, concrete block uses less concrete than slabs, so you 
could put in a double wall, ties between the sections, and get some 
insulation in there, between the two rows of block and in the block 
cavities.

The DVD mentioned, "Building with Awareness" is good.  Production values are 
excellent, no small matter.  All the Amazon reviews are 5-star, including 
mine, which a) has a typo in it and b) is by far the most curmudgeonly of 
the lot.  The plastering sections alone are worth it.  The woman's voice, 
the specially composed music, and the incessant repetition of the word 
"aesthetic" did get to me.  And after that long song and dance about less 
concrete, he has a slab floor.  This is a codes approved house, so he may 
have had to, but couldn't he have agonized a bit over it?

..........................
Lisa wondered how to do a foundation/stemwall, Charmaine answered her:

Ted Owens in his new DVD about his tiny SB-adobe  house showed how he did a 
trench with rubble and Urbanite ( the word you wanted) in it, the a small 
pour of cement at the top  of X inches... so it saved on consumption of 
portland cement for  a big perimeter pour.


On Apr 24, 2005, at 8:58 PM, Lisa Winter wrote:


>   But we are having a hard time deciding what
>to use for foundation.  we are going to dig a trench
>and then fill it with a drainage pipe and then gravel.
>   how to build up
>the foundation tall enough to do our cob building.


>and if we would need to cement them together.  we've
>also discussed using old concrete from like sidewalks
>(it has a name- which of course escapes me at the
>moment).
>  we've also discussed
>using poured concrete,  i'm just asking for some suggestions
>

>lisa and john
>


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