Rethink Your Life! Finance, health, lifestyle, environment, philosophy |
The Work of Art and The Art of Work Kiko Denzer on Art |
|
|
Cob: Re: Re: Time and cost?Vicki Wicker vcwicker at asub.eduWed Oct 31 12:51:18 CST 2001
Carla, My husband and I just put down a 14x14 earth floor. It took the two of us and our two teenage daughters a very long day (with one of us on baby sitting duty looking after our little boy). We already had our clay sifted. It has dried about 2 weeks now and I can start putting the linseed oil on. That only takes about an hour at a shot, but have to wait a few days between coats, now that it's pretty cool weather. (We're not living there yet so no heating) The hardest part was troweling it smooth. I was grateful to have my big muscular husband with nice long arms for that part. For one of the other rooms we made foot square earth tiles, laid and mortared those. That definitely takes longer. The advantage was I could make those while my husband was working on the roof. Laying and mortaring the floor only took a few hours and I did it by myself. (laid in sand). 80 tiles took me a full week of working a few hours each evening. But mostly by myself. And with the use of a mortor mixer, which we have because my husband works in construction. I'm sure longer if youre hand mixing. Also, I found great variation in sifting time. The first soil I sifted had a lot of rock, came from where they dug in for our partially bermed house. It would take maybe over an hour to get one wheel barrow full of clay. Then my husband dug the septic lines. I was able to sift out a wheelbarrow of clay from that in maybe a third of the time, and better stuff. However, from the first batch I have a lot of "pea gravel" that I will be using in walk paths, so it wasn't a total waste. Hope this helps on calculating your floor time. We haven't built any cob walls. We're strongly leaning toward strawbales with cob finish. The part of the house that is finished(more or less) is concrete block because it is basically a basement with living roof. Maybe this will give you a little info. I think if I needed to get something up faster I'd go strawbale. Because you could get yourself "closed in" and be more leisurely about getting the finish on. Or you might put up your roof, build an "inner room" of straw bale that is like a little efficiency appartment, and then develop your cob around it. Straw is pretty cheap here (rice country) and much of it gets burned off, so i feel good using it. Plus, because of our humid hot summers, we really need insulation over mass. It would only take me a few days to earn the money to buy the bales for a structure that would probably take months to build in cob. Our 24x24x16 foot main part of our house is going to cost about $800 worth of bales.(@$2ea). So, I guess it depends in part on your ability to generate income balanced with how quickly you need to get in. hope that helps vicki in arkie
|