[Cob] storm damaged walls/doorway

[Kim West]

Hello all. I am writing this to see if anyone here has any words of 
wisdom concerning a recent problem that we are having with our cob house 
project.

We endured months of almost daily severe thunderstorms here--so many 
that our county was declared a disaster area. The site was covered and 
came through quite nicely in spite of it all. A few days ago we thought 
that the storms had receded to be replaced by our normal weather for 
this time of year. We uncovered the site and looked for any damage that 
may have befallen the walls during the winter, spring, and early summer. 
All we found was slight damage from fire ants and a slumping cob couch 
caused by some of the rain leaking under the covering and soaking it.

All was [relatively] well and we decided to begin cobbing anew. We mixed 
and applied approximately 10 cf of cob to the couch and decided to take 
advantage of the wonderfully warm July weather by allowing the walls and 
couch to dry out some. Alas, another thunderstorm was foreseen to come 
to our little neck of the woods so we again covered the site. The new 
piece of plastic that we were using was one solid piece and was resting 
on the three door frames that had been cobbed in partially last year.

The weight of the water from this last thunderstorm was so great that 
one of the door frames tilted over in spite of being braced on each 
side. Imagine--months of severe storms and no damage to speak of then 
this little thunderstorm did this! Today we uncovered the site to survey 
the damage and was stunned to see what had happened. Not only did the 
door some loose from the cob there was some damage [cracks] to the 
surrounding walls as well. We are needing to know if anyone here has 
experienced this kind of damage and if so what did they do to fix it and 
what were the results. We really hate to have to redo so large an area 
of the house.

I have pictures that show exactly what happened, and just now tried to 
get them to load onto a geocities website in the [vain, it seems] hope 
that geocities had improved since the last time that I tried to use it. 
I was wrong. I still do not have the pics posted on the web [if anyone 
knows a good, free site where I can post them please let me know] but I 
can send them to you personally if you'd like. We really need some input 
here from others who have been through this or something similar.

If you'd like to see the pics and know the extent of damage before 
commenting you can email me directly at kwest at arkansas.net and I will 
send them to you.

Thanks and happy cobbing 2004!

Kim