Rethink Your Life! Finance, health, lifestyle, environment, philosophy |
The Work of Art and The Art of Work Kiko Denzer on Art |
|
|
Cob: Small cob housingR M rachel_merrill at hotmail.comWed Jul 2 19:13:26 CDT 2003
Somebody mentioned how its easy to overlook how small those houses in the cob books are. That's true, it's hard to tell from photographs how big a space is. In the year or so since I first came across the idea of cob, I've been mulling that over. I came to the conclusion that, first of all, a lot of us feel the need for a bigger house just to store all of our stuff / clutter. I've purged our house many times over the last year, and now our 1200 sf home that seemed to small is very spacious. The other reasons I can think of to need a bigger space, are for entertaining, and so the inhabitants of the house can get away from each other. (There are nicer ways of putting that, but that's what it comes down to) I realized that the first cob cottage I saw pictures of (Ianto and Jane's) has that beautiful enclosed courtyard, with a wood burning oven and a fireplace. This gives you the room to spread out when you have guests, or when you just need some space between each other. The enclosed space is for sleeping and eating, although I imagine a lot of eating takes place outdoors, too. It seems to me that if you approach cob with conventional expectations, if you're 'using' it as a way to get a big house that you wouldn't otherwise be able to afford, you're going to be disappointed. I guess cob building proves that old axiom, "If it's cheap, and fast, it's not easy, If it's cheap and easy, it's not fast, If it's easy and fast, it's not cheap." If the joy and thrill of living in a beautiful, earth-friendly home that you built with your own two hands is more important than having a big house, then it seems like cob is a good answer. BTW, I guess I should introduce myself, I've been lurking awhile, but haven't had anything to contribute. My husband and kids and I are travelling up to California next week to get our hands dirty helping someone else raise their walls, so I'm very excited to finally get some hands on experience! Rachel -------------- next part -------------- <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN"> <HTML><HEAD> <META http-equiv=Content-Type content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1"> <META content="MSHTML 6.00.2600.0" name=GENERATOR> <STYLE></STYLE> </HEAD> <BODY bgColor=#ffffff> <DIV><EM><FONT face="Lucida Sans" color=#000080 size=2>Somebody mentioned how its easy to overlook how small those houses in the cob books are. That's true, it's hard to tell from photographs how big a space is. In the year or so since I first came across the idea of cob, I've been mulling that over. I came to the conclusion that, first of all, a lot of us feel the need for a bigger house just to store all of our stuff / clutter. I've purged our house many times over the last year, and now our 1200 sf home that seemed to small is very spacious. The other reasons I can think of to need a bigger space, are for entertaining, and so the inhabitants of the house can get away from each other. (There are nicer ways of putting that, but that's what it comes down to) I realized that the first cob cottage I saw pictures of (Ianto and Jane's) has that beautiful enclosed courtyard, with a wood burning oven and a fireplace. This gives you the room to spread out when you have guests, or when you just need some space between each other. The enclosed space is for sleeping and eating, although I imagine a lot of eating takes place outdoors, too.</FONT></EM></DIV> <DIV><EM><FONT face="Lucida Sans" color=#000080 size=2> It seems to me that if you approach cob with conventional expectations, if you're 'using' it as a way to get a big house that you wouldn't otherwise be able to afford, you're going to be disappointed. I guess cob building proves that old axiom,</FONT></EM></DIV> <DIV><EM><FONT face="Lucida Sans" color=#000080 size=2>"If it's cheap, and fast, it's not easy,</FONT></EM></DIV> <DIV><EM><FONT face="Lucida Sans" color=#000080 size=2>If it's cheap and easy, it's not fast,</FONT></EM></DIV> <DIV><EM><FONT face="Lucida Sans" color=#000080 size=2>If it's easy and fast, it's not cheap."</FONT></EM></DIV> <DIV><EM><FONT face="Lucida Sans" color=#000080 size=2></FONT></EM> </DIV> <DIV><EM><FONT face="Lucida Sans" color=#000080 size=2>If the joy and thrill of living in a beautiful, earth-friendly home that you built with your own two hands is more important than having a big house, then it seems like cob is a good answer. BTW, I guess I should introduce myself, I've been lurking awhile, but haven't had anything to contribute. My husband and kids and I are travelling up to California next week to get our hands dirty helping someone else raise their walls, so I'm very excited to finally get some hands on experience!</FONT></EM></DIV> <DIV><EM><FONT face="Lucida Sans" color=#000080 size=2>Rachel</FONT></EM></DIV></BODY></HTML>
|