Build Your Own House, Dirt Cheap

Home

Dream House

Tag it:

Modern buildings are expensive to make and buy; the energy involved in construction, extracting, processing and transporting materials is huge, pulling them down uses up similar amounts of energy and usually results in pollution. So why not build your own house out of mud or, to be more precise, cob?

You will need:

A fairly large pile of clay-heavy earth
A couple tons of gritty sand
A few nice big stones for the foundations
Some willing cobbers

Some willing cobbers will help build your new home quickly. The basic ingredients of cob are soil, sand and straw. Under normal conditions, the topsoil removed from the footprint of the building is enough to supply all construction needs. Clay soils require the addition of more sand than do silty soils, but the overall quantities of sand and straw needed for a modest cob building are surprisingly small.

Cob is the material produced when you mix earth, sand and straw with a little water. You can build all kinds of structures with it simply by sticking the lumps together and moulding them to whatever shape you choose, very much like making a slab clay pot. You can alter the design of your cob building as you progress, adding in details like shelves, alcoves, furniture, fireplaces and windows.

There are no laws against building with earth, but there are always local standards and conditions that must be adhered to. Anyone embarking on a cob building-project will need to check their local regulations.

There’s something truly spiritual about walking into a completely hand-made home, knowing that real human hands have crafted every surface and curve. People have been building houses this way for thousands of years, there are cottages in Cornwall, England, built this way that are hundreds of years old.

Cobbing is currently been re-recognised as a viable and practical way to build a sustainable community; they are affordable and can be built by pretty much anyone, a creation that will last for hundreds of years.

The rate of building depends on the weather and the size of your workforce, but racing to build a structure would be missing the point and halving the fun. Unlike the conventional, modern building-practice with its frenetic pace, power tools, and scope for errors and accidents, cob-making is a peaceful, meditative and rhythmic exercise.

Cob building was used in Britain and Europe for centuries as the standard method of building houses. It is simply earth, sand and straw mixed together and pressed into the foundations, creating load-bearing walls that last for centuries.

Cob is one of the cheapest building materials imaginable. The owner-builder can take great satisfaction in supplying the labour, building little by little in leisure time, or inviting friends to share the excitement of hand-sculpting a whole house.

The United States is currently at the forefront of this return to cob building. There is a large self-build culture that is prevalent on the West Coast, they represent a contingent of new-thinking people who are dissatisfied with the general disregard to the environmental impact buildings have on our natural landscape and health.

There are many builders who are experimenting with alternative methods of construction that act in harmony with their surroundings and work with nature, instead of against it. The idea may seem a little New Age or very California, but cob buildings are a common sight today all over the world. Approximately 30% of all homes on Earth are made this way. Parts of China’s Great Wall are built this way and so are some of the oldest surviving arches and vaults in Iran.

With inventiveness and forethought, the costs of other components (doors, windows, roof, floors, etc) can also be extensively reduced.

Great cities have been built this way in Yemen, with buildings up to 14 stories high that have survived since the 1600s. Cob building is being used again in Europe and North America where people are rethinking how structures should be built, placing more emphasis on ecological and social sustainability.

No building system is earthquake-proof under every seismic condition, but cob buildings have several important advantages over the other earthen buildings. The curved, tapering walls are inherently more stable than straight ones; if they were to fail, they would tend to fall outward rather than inward. Since a cob building is one integral unit reinforced with straw, like a single adobe block, it has no weak, straight-line mortar joints. Carefully constructed earthen buildings in Latin America have withstood earthquakes of enormous force, while nearby concrete and wooden buildings collapsed.

Because building with cob is very much like sculpting on a large scale, it is very easy to make a wonderful piece of architecture that blends well with its surroundings, utilizing organic shapes that feel much more homely than the square mechanical buildings most of us are used to.

A cob wall looks very pretty. Cob designs can emphasise the character and climate of their site.

As well as been durable material and its construction been fluidic in form, cob’s main strength is in its thermal value. The buildings are suited to a wide range of climates; from the damper areas of Europe to the hot deserts of California where, incidentally, they can withstand earthquakes and do not catch fire.

Using local materials such as poles, bamboo, native stone, and cedar shakes, our second cob cottage was completed for about $500.

Virtually all the materials used for building your cob home are bio-degradable or recyclable, which makes it one of the most environmentally friendly ways of building an upstanding structure of this kind. When the building is finished the walls can be covered in non-toxic plasters and paints in any colour imaginable; all for minimum cost to the environment, future generation and, perhaps more importantly, your bank account.

Miguel Salmoiraghi's sculpted massage studio, built in Eugene, Oregon, 1995. Miguel had no previous building experience before he attended his first cob workshop - picture from http://www.cobcottage.com

Moreover, building your home in this way is said to be one of the most spiritually uplifting things anyone can do. Many cob builders report experiences of personal transformation; releasing their creativity through an easy-to-learn technique is self-empowering. It shows us all that most of us can and do have the ability to gain the skills to build a home.

Build Your Own House, Dirt Cheap

Essential Reading:

The Hand-Sculpted House by Ianto Evans

The Cob Builders Handbook by Becky Bee