The latest look of Gobcobatron

Our work on updating the interior of our cob house, Gobcobatron is finally complete! I think this latest design might be my favorite so far… although of course it’s so exciting just because it is “new”, too. We changed things around to make it an even more appropriate and better place to stay for renters and people who come stay for weekends. I think they are in for a treat…

Ready to Rent

Gobcobatron is officially a three seasons dwelling. We will no longer use it in the wintertime, when it is too cold and does not perform well enough. If you can remember, we have had some difficulties over our three winters in the house here in cold northeastern Missouri, and decided that the house would be best suited to spring, summer, and fall living, when it is comfortable, and does not require any heat, which has spawned a number of issues in the past… (Here’s my post about why cob is not appropriate for cold climates.)

A New Bed Frame

So, the wood stove is out, freeing up some space, and the bed frame is remade to accommodate a queen size mattress. It’s also way easier to get in and out of, now that it’s not pushed against the wall. I could tell you… I was getting really weary of literally climbing in and out sometimes…

New bed frame with black walnut headboard

I think the actual construction of this bed frame is much better than the last, too. I used some tricks I learned working with Greg in Tennessee. The corner posts are leftover brace stock (oak) from our timber frame house, and the head board is planed and oiled black walnut… mmm… one of my favorite woods.

Cleaning Up & Oiling a Terracotta Tile Floor

Other than that, we re-grouted the tile floor and finally got around to oiling it. We decided to use Land Ark’s (or Heritage Natural Finishes) concentrated finishing oil to seal the terracotta tiles and earthen grout. The tiles soaked two coats right up. Hopefully the grout is a bit more durable now that it is sealed and hardened a bit.

Of course there was dusting, of which there was much to do in the rafters… wow, talk about a disadvantage of having a really funky, non-flat ceiling. The dust stores up there were rich, I must say.

We also put another two coats of lime wash over the lime plaster on the bottom half of the walls. It’s amazing just how white a new coat of wash will make the walls. It was really amazing, and helped clean up the place, too.

Experience A Cob House For Yourself

If you have any interest in living in a cob house, we would love to have you here to experience life in Gobcobatron. Come for a weekend, or even just a night if you are passing through the area, or take one of our Natural Building Workshops and stay in the house while you are here. Get in touch!

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There’s been no shortage of things to do these past few weeks. Other than the usual building and gardening tasks, there’s been a lot on the list of items to complete.

I realize it’s been a while since I’ve posted any new photos of work on Strawtron… I promise we are not slacking. Nothing has jumped out at me as really photo-worthy just yet. Although that will change soon, as we are closing in the north porch and will soon be doing some light clay straw work. Yea!

Just when I think we’re done with work on Gobcobatron, we find more to do. As we are converting the cob house to a rental this year (see how you can stay in our cob house this summer!), it means we’ve taken some time to do some maintenance work — re-grouting parts of the tile floor, oiling the floor (finally), tearing out the mudroom floor to put in a more durable tile floor, making a brandy new bed frame to accommodate a queen size mattress, dusting the rafters… Didn’t I say I was “done” with this house before?

Things are looking really good in there with all of the clean-up work and fresh new coat(s) of lime wash. As soon as we iron out a couple of small details, I’m going to post some new photos. We even went for a new re-arrangement of the furniture… (Er, maybe that’s actually only interesting to me? Anyway…) I’m pretty happy with the new bed frame, too, and I want to show that off as soon as the mattress has some sheets on it…

Our new ducklings — exploding by the minute

We’ve got 20 chickens and 16 ducks to our name now, as well. The chickens had a few rough first days, as the temperatures decided to drop significantly as soon as they showed up, and the sun simply vanished. The ducks are doing just dandy, and they’ve got ravenous appetites. It shows, too — I swear they more than doubled in a week’s time. I am personally really excited to finally try my hand at raising ducks. I have been wanting to get some for a few years now. Duck meat is one of my most favorite foods of all time. We’ve got Pekins and Rouens (all males, for meat).

Our first morels of the season

On other food fronts… it’s morel season, and the land provideth. I hear folks are pulling in some good hauls. I haven’t gone too far and wide myself, hitting only a couple of usually productive spots, and I’ve been pleased to bring in at least a couple of meal’s worth. The first bunch made some absolutely yummy mushroom gravy. Mm.

Don’t you love the rush of adrenaline when you spot the first morel out on the land?

Fresh out of the oven

I’ve been really into making bread lately (even though we are trying to limit our grain consumption.. yea, it’s tough). Lately, I’ve been whipping out a few loaves a week of the NY Times-style no-knead bread. The recipe works wonderfully, and Prairie Gold’s White Whole Wheat flour is super yummo for this application. (Really, it’s great flour all-around. My fave.) Topped with a healthy slab of butter from our Mennonite neighbors, there are few things better.

April’s sweet walnut slab bench

Ok, enough about food. I realize I never posted pictures of April’s finished walnut bench that she started while we were at Greg Pennington’s shop in Tennessee. It looks amazing! It’s a real beauty, and garners lots of attention thanks to its really unique shape. The gorgeous wood doesn’t hurt, either. April uses it at her sewing machine these days.

Well, more news as it happens… hopefully one of these days our live edge oak siding will show up for the porch, and we can close that sucker in.

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The infamous (and absolutely gorgeous) H.O. Studley Tool Chest

By the way, comments should be back open! I swear, I am just constantly plagued by weird comments bugs on this blog, and half the time people can’t chime in because something in the inner workings of this here website has rewired itself again. Go ahead and try it now, though!

Moving on… In just a couple of short weekends, Handworks in Amana, Iowa is happening. Handworks (May 24-25) is a sweet little two day woodworking hand tool festival, with a bunch of companies turning out to show off their stuff, providing a good excuse for woodworkers and tool mongers to talk even more about sharp edged things.

Amana, the host town of the event, sounds like a really sweet place in and of itself. Check out this blog post from Benchcrafted about the Amana experience. What a sweet town! They’ve got a functional woolen mill, a smokehouse that’s been in business since 1855, a blacksmith shop, and lots of other cool stuff. Not to mention, the town doesn’t allow chain stores to open up shop in town — that sounds like my kind of place.

The other notable event during the Handworks weekend is a presentation about the now infamous H.O. Studley tool chest, pictured above. Unfortunately, the tool chest itself is on display elsewhere and won’t be viewable, but tool geek Chris Schwarz and Don Williams will be talking in-depth about the design of the chest.

We’re planning on being there, and I suggest you should, too, if you are close enough! The event is free, and there’s even door prizes.

Nice.

The post What a Studley Tool Chest… and More Woodworking Hand Tool Candy appeared first on The Year of Mud: Cob House & Natural Building.

I think I have it figured out. I’ve boiled life down to the most elemental action. As I see it now, life is basically an on-going series of moving objects around.

When you build a cob house, you move sand and clay and straw onto a tarp, or into a pit, and continue to move it around with your feet so that it’s mixed. Then you pick it up and move it onto the foundation (which may be a series of stones that you picked up and arranged on top of a drainage trench filled with gravel that you moved into place), and eventually, you get to a place where you might move wood around to form the shape of a roof. Of course the wood will need some work done to it, perhaps some joinery, which means you’ll be moving chunks of material out of the wood itself.

When you garden, you might start with moving soil to a specific place to make a garden bed, move some compost on top of that, maybe some mulch. You might start some seeds inside, move them into paper pots, wait till they get bigger, and move them outside. At the end of the season, you’ll have removed all of your vegetables from the plants, moved the dead or dying plants into a compost pile, and next year, you’ll start the whole process over again.

Firewood… find some wood, cut it and split it and move it, almost certainly more than once — move it into a shed to keep it dry, move it into your stove to burn it to keep yourself warm (when you’re sitting still and not moving). Oh, don’t forget to move the ashes out of the stove afterwards, so you have more room for wood.

Drawing and writing… move a pencil along the surface of a sheet of paper to transfer a mark. Cooking… combine different ingredients into a pan on the stove, or in the oven. Oh, and how far did those foods move to get to your kitchen and onto your plate?

You get the idea.

Some days, it feels like all I am doing is shuffling things around, moving one object from one location to the next. I guess it can have some sweet results, but moving stuff sure is a lot of work…

photo credit: The Hamster Factor via photopin cc

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Roundwood timber framing implements whole trees, eliminating the waste from milling larger trees into dimensional timbers, and offers a host of other benefits in the realm of timber frame construction.

Our Timber Frame Workshop this year will focus rather heavily on roundwood joinery and techniques, which I do believe is rather unique to this class. If you’re curious about implementing whole trees in natural building, you’ll have your chance this summer.

And be sure to check out my guest post for Tiny House Design here — 3 Benefits of Roundwood Timber Framing.

Image source: Ben Law’s Woodland Home

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Plastering your straw bale house — a critical step to get right!

Plastering straw bale walls is time-consuming, it requires finesse, and it’s definitely something you want to avoid having to do over again, at all costs. Plaster is a barrier to the elements, to moisture, and it’s what will define the aesthetic appearance of your home. I recently appreciated Andrew Morrison’s succinct plastering tips article at Strawbale.com.

If you want a better handle on how to do a successful plaster job on your house, read this! It’s the most technical and critical part of straw bale construction.

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Handmade toll roll for less than $5!

Protect your tools. Both you and they will be much happier with adequate shelter and storage. Even with our new tool shed, there is still a feeling of inadequacy for the storage of some of our building tools. Better shelves might help, but we’ve got planes, chisels, and all manner of things that are a bit too “exposed” and unprotected for my liking.

However, we are on the way to changing some of that, now that April made her first leather tool roll for our timber framing chisels. I’m in love with it!

Homemade Leather Tool Roll

We picked up two big scraps of this funny green-blue leather from the flea market this weekend, for a whopping $5. (Don’t you just love the flea market?) My first thought was — tool roll! And so April spent some time today crafting this most excellent chisel roll. It has pockets for seven chisels, and it rolls tidily and has a leather strap for tying it shut.

We debated whether or not to store the edge side of the chisel in the pocket, or out (as seen above), and whether or not to made it single or double-sided. We found images of every possible combination, so we simply let the available materials decide for us. The leather was thick enough to feel durable, but also light enough to push through a sewing machine without too much trouble.

For less than $5 and a couple hours worth of design and sewing, I’d say it was worth the effort. You can easily spend $40 on something comparable.

Next up is a smaller tool roll for carving chisels. Protect your stuff, if you can help it!

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Straw bale & timber frame house in the works

I wonder: is timber framing and straw bale building the perfect marriage of two building techniques? Of course, I may be a bit biased, as I am building a timber frame and straw bale house as we speak, but I think there is much to say for the compatibility, efficiency, and beauty of these two systems. I’ll lay out my line of thinking here, including the benefits of timber framing and straw bale alone, and the two systems combined.

Timber frame is left exposed on interior when wrapped in bales

The Advantages of Timber Framing

The advantages of timber framing are numerous. Timber frame buildings are more durable and long-lived than any other framing system. They absolutely put stick frame houses to shame, for one — there are timber frames over 1000 years old still in existence.

They also have the advantage of greater fire resistance (think of the difference between burning a sheet of paper, versus a book of paper), and a better resistance to earthquakes and severe weather. (In Japan, timber frames are ingeniously designed so that the frame will fall apart before posts and beams are buckled and damaged in an earthquake scenario.)

The use of timbers can be rather economical, as well. Timbers generally do not travel very far to the building site, meaning local sources of wood are more likely to be used, and whole trees or the majority of a trunk is used in the production of a timber. Despite a higher initial cost in materials and labor, the payoff is a structure that will last exponentially longer than a conventional home.

Uninterrupted insulation also protects frame

Straw Bale House Benefits

Straw bale houses pose a number of benefits, many of which should be fairly obvious. Here are a few of the advantages:

• Straw bales are extremely insulative (they are typically quoted to be an average of R-35 for 18″ of thickness, or “R-Enough”, as some like to say).
• If well-maintained, straw bale walls can last at least 100 years or more
• Like heavy timbers, straw is not liable to catch fire very easily.
• Straw bales are widely available and are a renewable resource, they’re completely biodegradable, and inexpensive
• Bales are fairly simple to work with, requiring few specialized tools.
• They have excellent sound absorption qualities.
• Bales can regulate moisture as they are a breathable medium, and are appropriate for a range of climates, especially colder or more northerly regions.

Timber Frames and Straw Bale: The Perfect Union?

Now, to speak to my original claim — why are timber frames and straw bales an excellent marriage of two building systems? Let’s look at some of the combined benefits:

• You can achieve a fully insulative envelope — straw bales work best when they wrap a timber frame, providing uninterrupted insulation. The insulation in stick frame homes, on the other hand, is interrupted at each stud every 16″. And timber frames with infill insulation are more likely to have air penetration at each junction.
• On a similar note, notching straw bales can be largely avoided when used in conjunction with a timber frame, saving time during the construction process.
• Straw bales protect a timber frame from weathering — the most critical element of the home, the frame, is protected when fully wrapped in bales. It is way more costly and complicated to repair the frame of the house, versus the walls. Straw bale walls, in a worst case scenario, can be knocked out or replaced without affecting the framing. The timbers, as they are not exposed to the weather, are much more likely to last a long, long time.
• Aesthetic advantages are numerous, including an exposed frame on the interior, which is visually appealing and functional for dividing living spaces, and posts and beams provide an area for hanging objects. Straw bale walls are thick, and offer creative opportunities in the way of window seats, curved window reveals, and niches.
• Notably, the use of straw bales and timbers conforms to several of the “patterns” in A Pattern Language, including #160 Thick Walls, #206 Efficient Structure, #207 Good Materials, etc.

Ultimately, a timber frame and straw bale house is very tight (but not 100% airtight, which is an important distinction, and arguably a good thing, depending on who you talk to) and offers excellent energy efficiency. It offers superior and uninterrupted insulation, provides excellent fire resistance and longevity, and is much more aesthetically pleasing than a conventional frame with drywall. The use of these systems provides a better opportunity to use local and natural resources, resulting in less waste and a home that at some far-off date will degrade fairly harmlessly back into the earth.

Paying careful attention to a floating window buck

Perhaps the main challenge in this marriage is the framing of doors and windows, which is perhaps tricky in some cases, but can be overcome with good design and careful attention to detail. Also worth mentioning is that careful attention must be paid to plaster details around posts and beams, as clay plaster is especially liable to shrinkage, so that builders must be careful to deal with gaps in the plaster.

Well, what do you think?

Related reading:

http://www.strawandtimber.com/STRAW_BALE_QUESTIONS.html
http://www.lowimpact.org/factsheet_straw_bale_building.htm
http://www.buildnaturally.com/EDucate/Articles/Strawbale.htm
http://www.strawtec.com.au/page.php?id=5#GoodBales
http://www.timberframemag.com/advantages.html

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One year ago, our straw bale house was nothing more than a handful of holes dug in the ground. Now it’s got a completed timber frame, it is fully baled in and at least partly plastered over the interior and exterior, and half of the soil has been hauled up to the rooftop. The floor platform is insulated, we’re beginning to close in the porch, and I think I can say that things are looking pretty good coming into year two of building our timber frame and straw bale home.

This year, we get to do more first coat plaster, but even more finish earthen and lime plaster, install finish floors upstairs and downstairs, close in the north porch and build our rustic kitchen, finish the roof, and build our attached greenhouse. Oh, and build the spiral staircase, and a handful of other finish work tasks.

I am probably most excited about closing in the porch and getting a greenhouse built, as well as doing more plaster work. If I never have to get up on the roof again, I’d be a happy guy, but alas… I just have to keep telling myself it’s almost there, and that day will come soon enough. Getting the roof done will probably make the biggest aesthetic difference, so I should keep that in mind, too. Exposed EPDM membrane just doesn’t look so hot.

I fully plan on not going as crazy as we did last season, when we had to perform feats of endurance and strength on a massively tight deadline in massively record-breaking heat waves. I mean, I did enjoy myself much of the time, but wow… I really don’t want to do that on a regular basis.

Keep tuned as we begin our 2013 building season. I will also probably do some time traveling backwards and write more about what I didn’t have time to cover in 2012.

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It never fails: as soon as the first warm days come around, it instantly feels like there’s about 1,000 things to do. Days earlier, when it may have been cold or even snowing, or just unpleasant or winter-like, the pressure was off to do anything “productive” and one could feel good about sitting inside, reading, carving a spoon, and talking about things to do at some point.

We’re at that time now — spring is peeking out, and the activities are moving outside more and more. I suspect this will be a fairly enjoyable spring, as we have plenty to do, but no deadly-strict deadlines to fret about each waking day.

Activities to come, or those already in the process, include planting peas and potatoes, starting more summer season seedlings, cleaning up piles of lumber and consolidating building supplies, doing some maintenance work in Gobcobatron (including some cracks to fill, making a new bed frame, a new coat of exterior plaster), preparing for the arrival of ducks and chickens, and continuing work on Strawtron… namely, closing in the north porch, and then moving back to interior work.

I often find if difficult to choose what to do each day, but the weather occasionally helps dictate that, and there are certainly things more pressing than others. I must say, trying to provide for yourself means juggling lots of balls at once. It takes quite a bit of effort, and organization, no doubt. My favorite times are when I have one or two bigger projects to focus on, and fewer of the many and smaller tasks that need attention. I tend to be less present with a task if I am thinking about the four or five other things that can be happening at that same time.

I guess it’s all part of the game, though, and the learning never stops. Spring happens, and I generally welcome the changing patterns and routines that come with it.

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