In this week's episode, we're going to take a tour of one
extraordinary alternative home made of a natural material called Cob. What is Cob you ask? Don't worry.
We're going to get into that. The family that built and is now living
in the home is going to give us a short tutorial about how they built their
own beautiful home with their hands and feet. All right, guys, let's take a tour. 13, 14 years ago, we just stumbled
upon a picture of a Cob house. And ever since then, we were
inspired to build our own someday. And so we spent close to 10 years just
dreaming and designing and drawing and researching. We have been living in this
cob house for almost two years. And prior to that, we were living in our first Cob home
that we built for approximately three years. Our first house
was definitely a practice. We found a small piece of
property that my parents lent us. And so we built a small 350
square foot cob house on their property, just as an experiment and to stop
having to pay rent every month. And it was during that process that we
realized that all we wanted to do was natural building. So we started
looking for our own property. This house was quite the undertaking. It took a little bit longer
to build and it's much bigger. It costs us between 15 and
$20,000 to build this house, which is somewhere between
700 and 800 square feet. We are actually debt-free. And that is because we were able to
build this house out of pocket and we didn't have any overhead on this house. And while we were living
in the tiny cob house, we were able to pay for the
property to build this house on. I'm able to stay home and
raise my daughter and not
worry about daycare costs, things like that. So
it's been huge for us. This is our cob bench that we're currently
working on. So we thought we'd give. A small demonstration of how you
actually make Cob. Cob is really simple. It's a old building technique. It consists just of sand clay and straw. You mix it into kind of like a putty
and then you just build with it. So you can do whatever here. We've got a bucket of soil. Um, it's just clay and sand, and you want the ideal ratio to be about 20 to 30% clay, um, to 70 to 80% sand. So here
we just have a small amount. And what we're going to do is
what we're going to foot stomp it. I'm just going to add some
water to the dirt mix, and then you're just going
to kind of mix it together. And you want to just get a really
good mix of the clay and the sand. So what's happening is it's acting just
like mortar and bricks and the sand particles are getting
evenly coated with clay, and then they'll just bond together
to create a good structure. So if you have a lot of it, you can use a tarp like what we've
got here to mix it together by flipping it. So you can see,
you can just roll it over and get it in a nice pile
and then start squashin it. Going to just start adding some straw. And generally you want to use as long, uh, of straw as you can get the longer,
the better, because those fibers, as you can see on the bench, sticking out, they're going to cover more area and
kind of bond it, knit it all together. And here we've got some
pretty good mix of cob. So as your building with Cob You
generally build up in layers like this. When you're building a house like this, you genuinely want to dampen the layer
underneath it. This is just a bench. So it doesn't really matter too much. And it's going to get a final
coat plaster all over it too. So this bench, it took about a day to
build and then a week or two to cure. So you can see it's almost fully dry
now. So it doesn't take a lot of time. It is a little warmer out. So
if you live in a wetter climate, it'll take a little bit longer, but about 24 hours and it should
be good to put the next layer on. So you can build pretty quickly building
natural homes with my wife for about seven years. Now, this one is a straw bale cob
house typically called a bale cob. And we try to use as many natural
building techniques as we possibly could. The walls are comprised of straw bales, which means that it is actually
taking the load of the roof. And then the insides have four to eight
inches of cob as a thermal mass on the interior. This is our first year of
garden here. You can see, we have a lot of great
pollinating plants growing. We did thorough cement beds
and that's typical for water containing. It works extremely
well for raised garden beds. It takes minimal amounts of cement and
you can get really natural curves with them and just fill in
whatever soil you want later. The windows on the house,
they're all recycled windows. That was a huge cost saving for the home. New windows are typically very
expensive. And these ones, we are able to salvage either
from a recycling stores or from the garbage dump. Recycled materials is a really common
practice in earth and building. We have two bottles of wine
that are put together and created into a light tube.
So when the sun strikes them, it'll let a little bit of light in. But the real thing that you're looking
for is just artistic flair and the color that you get on the inside here, you can see more of the
bottles that we chose to do. This is on the opposite side of our
shower. So when you're in the shower, you can actually see the light
coming through the bottles. The plaster work is a technique
that is developed by Athena Steen. And she's a master plaster. Who's been doing it for 30 plus
years and it's done by putting multiple colors down and
letting them dry slowly, and then carving back the layers
to reveal the plaster underneath. So this is kind of a nice feature of the
house. It's looks like the foundation, but it's really just a facade. The
foundation is made of earth bags, and we did like a double row of it
to accommodate the thickness of our walls. And then afterwards, we
came back and we put these rocks, which we dug up from
Danny's parents' property. They're kind enough to let
us take some of their rocks. Cob can be very sculptural. Here's an example of where we just used
after having built this entire wall, coming back and using a sticky
cob to sculpt on a design and then plastering over it. And you can
do this really at any stage of cobing, whether it's, while you're first, initially cobingor later
on as an afterthought, Welcome to the interior of the house. You might feel like it looks bigger
on the inside than the outside. We get that a lot. I think part of the reason is because
we spent 10 years designing this house. That's key. When you're going into this is spend
more drawing and planning than you would building. We use these main support
beams here from our property. They were a dead tree, two
trees that had been beetle killed. And so we just took those down
in a strip, the bark off of them. I'm lucky enough to have four siblings. They all came up and we posted
these all up just with human bodies, Trying to build this
wall as flat as we could, because we knew in our other house,
we were trying to fit, you know, square kitchen counters onto
a curved wall. It's not easy. So we just had to do a few weird little
angles with this butcher block to get it to line up. Right. Another
thing that's key for designing. When you go to design a house is if you
know where you want to put cupboards, if you're building a
straw bale or cob house, you want wood that you can bury and
stabilize in the wall that you could then screw into later to hang
things, put up your cupboards. So sometimes with Cob, it's hard to either find something
that's recycled that you can upcycle or buying something new and trying
to fit it into a space that's already created. So it's easier to actually
just custom make some furniture, which is what we did here in the kitchen. We bought butcher block and just
lumber, really in some plywood. And we were able to build pretty good
amount of storage for our kitchen. Just with that, we built these tall shelves to try
to utilize the space we have going up. My wonderful mother got me
this beautiful sink. She said, what's something that you
wouldn't buy for yourself, but that would look nice in your new home. And so this is what I
chose and I love it. Here. We are in the living room or living space. And majority of our furniture in this
house is actually built out of cob it's cheaper and it looks cool.
Cob's a nice couch building material, because if you have a curved
wall like we did right here, you don't have to try to fit modern, you
know, flat back couches into a space. That's kind of hard. You just build your custom cob
bench in whatever shape you want. And you're good to go. One of my favorite things about cob is
the window sills that it creates its depth is just beautiful. This one shows exactly how
thick our walls really are. This is the truth window in our house. It shows the truth of what's in the
walls. You can see the straw bale. I talked about back here, and this is the thickness of the
cob that's built up in front of the straw bale. There's another, probably four inches on the other side
that helps sort of mortar the bales t ogether like bricks. Every struggle house should have a truth
window just to prove that it really is just a bunch of bales of straw. This space is centered around a very
important feature in a cold climate like Montana. And that is the heat source. This is a rocket mass heater,
unlike most rocket mass heaters, which feature a J style tube
only small amounts of wood at a time. This one actually has,
uh, an opening that, uh, could load, uh, a full amount of wood into it and just
be walked away from the fire still has that sideways effect. It's
going into the barrel. And then as the gas is cooled, they're going to drop down and run
through this big long masonry bench here, which is about two tons of masonry. And then it's going to flow back
up the chimney next to the barrel, where the gas can kind of collect
some heat off of the metal barrel and then exit the house. Nice thing about rocket mass heaters
are they're highly efficient. So the stoves are burning extremely
clean and you're locking all of the heat into the house. So this stove burns at around
1200 degrees in the back of it. But the temperatures going
outside are under 200 degrees. Well, key to the rocket mass heater. We figured this out cause we put one of
these in our first house and we ran into a few problems where we
didn't have enough clean outs. So the clean-out is down there. It's part of the exhaust system
that has a little cap once a year, take that off and you can clean out any
Ash or whatever that might build up. This wall is called a traum
wall and it's actually solid cob versus having bales in it. Uh, it's not doing any insulating cause
it's with inside the house and it's positioned right in front of the
big windows in the greenhouse. So it takes on a lot of solar
warmth and then slowly releases it. So these walls here are extremely
heavy and have just a lot of mass in them. This is what we call the greenhouse. It's kind of like an entryway is where
we try to get passive solar energy from the sun through those big windows in here, we did as well as the rest of the
house. We did earth and floors. They're also known as port
Adobe floors and it's similar to cob except that it's like a
finer material. So instead
of big pieces of straw, it's chopped straw and
sifted, clay, and sand, so that it's a much finer material and
you travel it and then you oil, it, it hardens up and you can
mop it just like any floor, sweep it, vacuum it. loves to play on it. You can roll cars on it. It's just
great. Back here is the bathroom. So we'd go check that out.
It's a very small space, but we figured why waste
valuable space on it. We did sort of a waterproof
plaster here on the shower. It's called Tadlack. Composting toilet. It's a very simple,
basic design. It's sawdust toilet. Lyra can even use it with
her compostable diapers. We just throw them right in there. Those
breakdown in the compost then as well. I was lucky enough to have the room with
the cob shelves because I don't do too many of them in our first house. I did them all over because it's so
fun and easy and sculptural to do, but when it comes to plastering
them, it's very difficult. Make sure even if it's easy and simple
to do during the cobbing stage that you understand that it might take you
10 times as long to plaster it, but it's aesthetically turns out
really nice. And I think worth, at least to do a few. One thing that happened with putting in
our earth and floors was our mixture. Just wasn't quite perfect in
this room, whether that was, it was too probably too wet. And what happened was there was a
crack that formed when it dried. And that was okay because actually it
gives you an opportunity to make it look really neat. You can fill it in with a different
color material and kind of own it. And it turns out looking
almost like marbled. So there's some good things that
can come from mistakes. Alrighty. So here we are in the second
bedroom, which is bedroom. I'd like to mention that some people might
tell you when you're going to build a house out of cob, that it's going to be cheaper to build
up versus out because you have the same amount of foundation and roof. You
have to keep in mind that building up. You're going to be lifting all
your materials twice as high. It took a lot more time to lift
materials up to that second level, a better option might be something
that maybe we would have done. If we could go back in time would
be to build with the plan to add an addition later. And if you just had like a window or a
door or something that you knew later, you'd knock out and have a second or
third room that might be the better route to take. All right. So now we're upstairs in the loft and
this space we built to be either a future bedroom or a guest bedroom or playroom. I would say living in a cob house has
simplified our lives even more than what we were before. For one,
just not having the mortgage. It gives us a lot more financial
simplicity and there's aspects of this house that force you to just kind of
take a step back and not be in such a hurry. Living a simple lifestyle
is definitely worth it. It's not something that you can understand
until you actually experience it. Once fell in love with natural. Living. We wanted to educate as many people as
possible and show them that alternatives exist and are reachable. You don't need to just do the
things that everybody else is doing. You can build your own home.
Anyone can do it. You know, there's things that a
professional carpenter would
have done a much better job doing, but, but we did it and there
are mistakes and we're done with it. And we have a place that we live in
now. And every time we think about that, it's an amazing accomplishment. Thanks for watching this week's episode. One of the best ways to support my channel
is to subscribe and share this video with your friends. And I will see
you next week with an all new video.
