Cob:

[Amanda Peck]

Thanks for the links. I found David and Sheila Knapp's home page on 
Geocities.  Got no hits for the Mud Spaces and Spirit book.  It sounds like 
it would be interesting.  The Build Your Own Adobe book is quite useful no 
matter what you are building.  Especially if it's in the library.

Rural Tennessee has not much in the way of codes.  Just the electrical 
inspection/septic tank requirement.  Not sure which counties are included, 
but Wayne, Lewis, Hickman are.  NOT Davidson and surrounding, almost 
certainly NOT Shelby and surrounding.

But you need to know if you will be able to stand any area you move to 
before you invest a lot of money and psychic capital to move there.  I'm in 
northern Wayne county, 30 miles from a large supermarket, 10 miles from a 
cup of coffee (actually maybe less, there's a bar a little closer), 50 miles 
from a real bookstore.  I know of 2 people with PhD's in the county, one 
retired, one a woodworker.  There may well be a couple more, in fact I know 
a third one building a house.  One of the Internet Service Providers is run 
by a biker who hated not having internet access.  There's a small 
intentional community 10 miles away (home of the woodworker PhD).

My nearest neighbors bought their land, had the shell of a frame cottage put 
up before they realized that electric service would run quite a bit more 
than their house.  And they had nothing in the way of guarantee of water 
(rumor hath it that the areas right beside the rivers are poor candidates 
for wells).  That's probably fixable, with rainwater catchment, but they are 
at the bottom of a really steep north-facing slope.  But they can walk down 
to the river all on their land.

When I broke my leg a year and a half ago (not, blessedly, a bad break), I 
drove myself into town to the doctor's office.  She wasn't there, but the 
staff sent me over to the hospital--I walked--for x-rays.  They did use a 
wheelchair to take me back to my truck, sending me roughly 50 miles to 
Columbia to the orthopedists.  I walked into that office too.

That's the kind of isolation you are likely to end up with if you move to 
deep country with the kind of no-zoning regulations you are thinking you 
want.  You do need to ask yourselves, is this a good trade-off, or would we 
be happier trying to build in a more settled area and keep sending all the 
engineering papers we can find to the local planning people?




Jill mentions some books, wonders (I've snipped some here) if we've looked 
at the index at http://geocities.yahoo.com/
I am considering take a few classes via the web at 
http://www.sfia.net/index.asp Has anyone else taken any traditional type 
classes? Architecture is a passion of mine - from a distance. This is my 
first hands on or training at any of this. I am glad to find this like mind 
list - at least similar in cob, if not other life views. :)



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