[Cob] corvallis cob cottage update

[Sarah Booth]

It's been a long time since I've updated this group on my husband and my cob cottage building project in Corvallis Oregon.  The re-cap; fall 2005-fall 2006 we spent building the walls of a sweet 200 (interior) square foot cob cottage which we intended to live in discreetly not wanting to deal with trying to educate the city and push through a permit.  October 2006, someone turned us in and we started dealing with the city.  After a year of researching the issues and talking to a friendly local engineer, we made pretty good head way.  One of the seemingly most daunting issues between us and the city was insulation value, as the codes state that the walls have to have a minimum value which typical cob walls do not have.  Just a couple of weeks ago, our engineer was talking to the city and together they determined that we could make up for the lack of insulation in the walls by adding enough to the floor and ceiling!  This was BIG news, one of our main issues solved!  Well, as things are now, we can only hope that this head way we made will be taken advantage of by someone else wanting to build with cob in Corvallis, Oregon.  The owners of the property we have been building on have determined, after researching the cost of bringing all utilities to the structure and paying for all applicable fees and permits, the structure will cost about $35,000 which is about $20,000 more than they expected and out of their price range.  So, after all this, we won't be persuing a permit for a habitable cob cottage.  We will hopefully be finishing the structure as a shed or out building (or possibly uncovering it and letting the Oregon rains take their coarse), we just need to convince the property owners that they want to keep this lovely little cob cottage on their property even if they can't use it to share their land with another home and family as they had desired.  So, from you I am asking for ideas, brain storms (and no ideas are bad in a brain storm).  What would you do if you had the walls of a cob structure in your back yard (on 1/2 acre, in the city).  How would you use this, what opportunities are we not seeing?  Thanks for the input!  Sarah Booth
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