Cob: Re: Re: Time and cost?

[Vicki Wicker]

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