Austin coder builds timeless cob home using precise patterns

one of my best friends is a real estate agent he was selling tracts of land out here is this just kind of ended up by accident you know this wasn't in the plan I don't this way before the internet I mean I started working on it thinking about it about 1985 well before Google or anything so my only resource was the architecture library at the University of Texas just looking through all their old books and they they say it looks like elf you know like Rivendell in The Hobbit movies one thing I can say in my own defense there is that I built this house ten years before the Hobbit movie was made so anybody stole anybody's idea you know I work at electronics and computers and so the thought of me being able to build a house seemed kind of crazy but I just saw no alternative there's no way I could afford hundreds of thousand dollars for paying hosts to get milk yeah I had no experience I joke I didn't even own a saw when I started this is what I'm building right now it's not yet pegged together if you can take the time to do a mortise and tenon woodworking you don't need anything to hold it together it you can climb on these stairs right now the wood is holding it all yeah I have to I have two boys yeah how large is the house interior it's 832 square feet rather this will have a a handrail here when I'm done and it's a little funky there wasn't enough space so you can to do the limbo here at the last step get an i-beam what's the right thing when you're leaving a pleasure on home oh she was pretty skeptical but that was definitely an uphill battle the where's the best is that a bed right that's the yeah good mean see the bedroom is just that corner of the house how did you come up with the idea that I'll just build my own house now I think was just pure economics you know I just don't think I could afford to pay other people so how did you know like for engineering and that type of thing that was none it was like well you know five by five I thought to be big enough for this it looks about right and these ones ought to be six by sixes and ya know no math no engineering but it's I think it's over built I think it's more than it needs to be since I was building for myself I was willing to go the extra mile to put in the bigger Timbers or whatever that might have been necessary at the time back in mid 80s I did do some queries early I was basically told that I did not need prevents or inspections for a fan or build house like this well I did have an architect friend who recommended the scissor trust so I would have the two different pitches and here you see the the steep pitch where the roofs at but this lower member here that's the one that goes outside and forms the pitch of the eaves of the house and the Timbers sticking out of the house from inside and it's at the pitch of the eaves how'd you meet the decision to go with what you wanted to build with well it started out the Holy Grail was maintenance-free you know I was talking about galvanized tin log-cabin kids were just something I could build and forget and then at one point I got into stone I want a real primitive and so they eventually this old world look started to really appeal to me and then I went to this guy who does consulting for indigenous housing projects he was telling me well if you want to build out of stone that's fine but you're gonna have to build two stone walls with insulation between them otherwise you won't be able to cool in the summer you won't be able to heat in the winter and I thought oh man stonework is hard to stone walls and they're never mind and he said well here I'm working on this other project where we're building this with this mud straw process and when I worked on that mud straw house for one day basically and in two hours you learn everything there is to learn about the mud straw process it's just so utterly simple and after I said hey I could do that it's mud and straw is real similar to cob the straw clay is another term for it the old cob method they would mix up mud sand and clay and straw and then form these lumps they call them cobs and then they just jam those onto the wall and just build up a wall that way and then pare them down and kind of plumb this way you take a bunch of straw and dump clay mud clay slurry on it he'd get clean water towards about the consistency of say pancake batter and then you dump it on a bunch of straw and toss it around with pitchforks till it's all gray and coated and then you buy the pitchfork full throw it up on the wall and usually put up form boards on either side of the wall and then fill it with this mud straw stuff pack it down and just like a piece of 2x4 and then you can move the forms up and just keep building the wall up that way you're putting form boards in to hold this stuff while you're building it the form boards come away and then you can kind of come in with a handsaw or chainsaw or a hatchet and just kind of chop it down to be the way the shape you want you know once it's done it dries into this hard you can drive a truck into this thing and it just bounce off and it all gets plastered so I put in you know a million hours labor into the thing I built this little building a few years before I built the house to test the idea so this is built to the same mud straw stuff there wasn't you know there was never real set of plans like a typical builder would start with everything's thought-out ahead of time it evolves and it's part of a philosophy you wait till you get in the context and then you decide does the window go here there's the one to go there it's real easy on a drafting table you know miles from the site to go okay well we'll put the window right in the middle or something but when you get there you go well see right there's the view you know and that's the way things ought to be built one of the first things you're supposed to do in deciding house first you place it on the lot and you place it in what's not the best part of the lot but the worst part lies it's called site repair you think about like like so the what we were gonna ridge initely build on these Rock Bluff lines and it's one of the few interesting features you know where the rocks are coming on the ground but then we would have ruined that spot the most beautiful places on your lot all you can do is mess em up and the worst place is all you can do is improve them so we put it towards way towards the back of the lot where it was the least interesting part of a lot another pattern says you placed your front door first you decide where the front door goes before you decide anything other than the way the basic house is going and you design it so that you see the front door as you're approaching the house so there's not this ambiguity about well do I go the front door do I go to the garage door do I and then the pattern language is full of those kinds of ideas they're not telling you what kind of door to build they're simply saying here's the important thing and everything just kind of unfolds look at this troll window that looks really complicated with all the curves yeah I mean there's it's not plain in any dimension this is one that I'd taken the frame to a stained glass studio asking for advice on how to build it and the guy just said there's no way you know no way you know you can't build something like that so so I just came home and you know plotted with it I couldn't eventually I cut out a piece of cardboard and fit it in and then just laid the pieces of glass on it kind of tack soldered them and it really wasn't hard you just keep scratching your head do you come up with a way that works to find a log that did that I scoured the forest for days looking for that piece of wood and the same for like the the door here Davies was going to be two pieces of wood that came up and met Bo the way I'd cut them they're about an inch too short so scale back to there but if you think it's easy to find curved logs but now it's curved in multiple directions and I needed I'm fairly straight so I did this trick that I'd learned from history they used to send people over from the old world to the Americas to find logs for the big boats well when the old will they build these templates out of junk wood and say get me a log shape like this they'd find the logs and ship them back and build the baby boats and so I'd cut out pieces of card wood and went around the forest and spent days and days to find logs that had the right curve for the for the front door when we come out after an extended absence if it's really hot out it'll be about 15 degrees cooler inside or if it's winter and 20 or 30 degrees it'll be 10 or 15 degrees warmer just because it's coupled to the earth and well insulated that log and the logs that make the outside porch they were the floor joists of the oldest standing law cabin in Austin I bought him from the city clerk they tore down this old log cabin so you were keeping an eye out oh yeah for about three or four years I was just acquiring stuff and I if you look around there's this pink granite all over the place here I ran this ad and this in the newspaper classifieds back when that was kind of the equivalent of Craigslist I just had wanted old marble and granite pieces so the whole the floors in the bathroom are granite marble I made friends with these people who tear down houses for a living so there's all the wood like the wood at the big window boxes and all the stairs and it's all these are old floor joists from Victorian 1970 houses but then when you're around to building something well you go look at the wood pile and see what you got and find a way to make it work so a lot times your dimensions don't work out quite what you want because like well this is the only piece I had like here I had to do this funky thing because these weren't quite wide enough there's a saying in the army about you know you go to war with the army you've got well you build your house with the wood you've got so this is just a little microwave the fridge is the one I did first you got to tell by how shiny the copper is this one's been done for 20 years this is been about 10 years or it's just a standard garage sale fridge I bought for about 50 bucks about $300 worth of copper on it when I saw how it was just the white fridge and it was just so offensive to my eye you know and I just I couldn't take that I had to cover that thing up this was just a tough area I wanted the modern appliances I want electricity and running water I'm not now wanting to live like a caveman but it just didn't look good enough so I've got the microwave of a convection microwave oven and the convection oven down there this is the range top it's controls and stuff garçon soaps on you can carve with a pocketknife soap sodas real soft every single thing in the house was kind of hand-on and so I probably would have built a normal house but I had no idea how houses were built so just everything I just had to contrive on my own things like this happen because I didn't know nobody does this yeah you know one thing that always bothered me when I was writing a lot of computer programs and stuff is everything I did was obsolete through four years later you know such a fast-moving industry nothing lasts and so maybe this was an inner drive to make something that will last be

Channel: Kirsten Dirksen

Views: 1,011,050

Keywords: owner built home, diy home, diy, small space, simple living, simplicity, craft, craftmanship, earth building, cob home, hobbit home, building permits, zoning, austin, texas, pattern language, salvaged wood, building salvage, reclaimed wood, timeless home, imperfection

Id: DXmAwx8Imxw

Length: 12min 37sec (757 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 04 2014