Plastering is my favorite part of any cob build. I spend the entire build looking forward to it and dreaming about the final result. Plastering is what transforms a mass of sculpted earth in to a structure that looks and feels finished. I find the process of plastering read more
Building the Cob Honey House: Part 4 – The Earthen Floor
The Honey House now had a roof and roof top access. The next step was to install a floor. Up until this point the floor had simply been the earth on which the Honey House was built. It looked fine but we wanted something more stable, water tolerant, and wipeable (honey read more
Building the Cob Honey House: Part 3 – The DIY Spiral Staircase
The honey house now had a green roof with a sitting deck but we had no easy way of getting up on to it. We had thought about a roof access system from early on in the build and considered incorporating floating stairs in to the back wall or building a ladder. It wa read more
Building the Cob Honey House: Part 2 – The Green Roof
When designing the honey house we knew we wanted a green roof to increase garden space and replace the lost green space taken up by its footprint. The honey house also faces West and overlooks the bee yard which we felt would make a nice sitting spot in the evening read more
Building the Cob Honey House – Part 1: The Main Structure
In 2015 we built a purpose designed cob shed for storing our apiary boxes off the hives over the winter. We have taken to calling this the Honey House since it resides in our bee yard and holds apiary wares. It is just under 90 square feet in area, with an interior heig read more
Building the Cob and Green Roof Garden Wall – Part 5: The Green Roof
From the earliest conception of our garden wall, we dreamed of topping it with a green roof. However until we actually started building the roof we had no idea how we were going to go about it. We first needed some sort of truss system since we wanted the roof to provide a protective eave for the wall. Again, we turned to Sketchup to model the dimensions of these trusses and settled on a pitch of 4 in 12 and a horizontal eve span of roughly 6 1/2″. We built the trusses out of dunnage from the lumber yard garbage bin, a GREAT source for scrap 2x4s, and fitted them along the top of the wall, tacking them in to place with blobs of cob. We did our best to tilt each one to rest roughly 90 degrees to the tangent of the curve at each point.
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Building the Cob and Green Roof Garden Wall – Part 4: The Cob and Reclaimed Sink Water Fountain
To give our wall a little curb appeal from the barn road and to get experience plumbing in cob structures we decided to incorporate a water feature in to the T junction buttress. Conveniently, around this time, the barn was getting a spring clean and an old porcelain sink was pulled out and left for the taking. We took it!
Building the Cob and Green Roof Garden Wall- Part 3: The Wall Fireplace
Early in the cobbing phase of building our wall, we decided to incorporate a fireplace in to it. We had so much fun building our first fireplace, and enjoyed using it so much, that this seemed like a perfect fit for our wall build. We placed it midspan on the soft curved wall, facing the original fireplace which allows us to have double fire place nights when our friends come over.
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Building the Cob and Green Roof Garden Wall- Part 2: The Cob!
We started laying on the cob to our wall in March 2014. The earth for this project came from a construction site just down the road. It was a beautiful mishmash of grey clay, grit, and stones and required only the addition of straw and water to get a good consistency for cobbing.
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Building the Cob and Green Roof Garden Wall- Part 1: The Foundation
In the summer of 2013 we built a cob outdoor fireplace. As soon as it was first fired, it became an instant gathering site and the large manure pile immediately behind it that collected from our barn of 7 horses became an increasingly troublesome eyesore (a shortcoming we had somehow overlooked in the fervid planning of the fireplace construction). We use the manure extensively on our property, to fertilize our pastures, build our hugelkultur gardens, and fertilize our berry patches and flower beds so getting rid of it was not an option. The solution to this problem obviously entailed another cob structure, and so was born the idea of the cob garden wall.
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