Building a Natural Home

This weekend was quite hairy, though we came out OK.

There were some bigger items on the plate: we were to install all the windows we can, and also start on the straw clay wall. But after trying to make staw clay for 2-3 hours we decided not to do it. First, neither of us has done straw clay, nor taken lessons. My wife understood what it was and have seen it done, but since I was the one doing it, I failed to make up a batch of straw clay that worked. Plus it was going to be quite time-consuming.

So we ditched the idea, quickly re-drew the plans and decided to do conventional framing for the north wall, with insulation between the outer and the inner wall. I went to Home Depot to get the lumber, and off I go, framing a new wall.

In the mean time, my wife worked on finishing up tiling inside our cob house. This was a major project, too, and she made great progress. The tiling is now all done except for the few around the toilet. We are considering moving the toilet, so decided not to tackle that area.

On Saturday we had a tropical rain storm, which blew portions of the tar paper covering our strawbale house’s roof. There was some major leakage, and I was up on the roof in the middle of the storm trying to patch it up. Phew!

The good news is that a metal roof is finally ordered and will be here within a week. We know how to install a metal roof, so we’re hoping to put it up very soon. Leaking roof is never good for life.

Well, we’re back from vacation and last weekend I spent cleaning our construction zone. We’re about to order the roof for the new cottage.

Keeping the zone clean is very important. It helps you work better and safely. But it’s an area that I’m not particularly good at. I usually work until I’m about ready to drop, and by then I don’t have any energy left to do good cleaning. We have ruined many tools and material because we didn’t take good care of them. I am definitely not proud about that.

This weekend in Central Texas the heat went through the roof with 3-digit figures. We’ve had to really watch ourselves, making sure we’re hydrated and rested. Our natural homes are well-insulated, but this heat is overpowering. That said, up to lower 90s, our home is pleasant — we still need A/C but not much. All in all, we’re weathering the summer well.

This weekend I put up a few more posts of the interior walls. I wish I could have done more, but there are a few decisions/researches that are pending.

Designing a building is a monster job. I don’t envy those who do it all the time — I hope they like doing it! Being amateurs that we are (though we are on our second cottage) there are lots of decisions that get made in-process, and our plans change. You can never have a perfect house, so the ability to look at variables and pros/cons and making a reasonable, rational decision is a key. I hear that house renovations are potent marriage killers. Well, my wife and I are not anywhere near that danger right now, but I can see how building a house together CAN kill a marriage.

Next 2 weeks we will put the house on hold and attend other matters. After that, major projects coming up — roof, ceiling, electric. I can’t wait to get these decisions out of the way and start working on those big things. Because that’s when progress is much more obvious — it’s hard to feel productive about a few posts and hours of discussions (though it’s all very important and necessary).

This weekend we got started on the inner walls. The new strawbale cottage will house our bedroom, bath and toilet (in two separate chambers) and some storage space. I got some 2x4x10s to use as posts.

The trick is the reasonable amount of precision required to put up these posts. It’s kinda hard to measure the precise location and put them up perfectly straight by myself. Getting my wife to help me is out of question, though, as the house is swarming with bees. (I mentioned that before, didn’t I?) Got stung again this morning.

In any case, every time we move on to a different project, it seems that we have to spend quite a lot of time figuring out how to go about it. This was no exception. At first we spent some time discussing how the house’s actual dimension came out smaller than what we designed. So we had to remove some walls from inside as well. Then I sat and thought about how I was going to do this by myself. I posted 1 post all of Saturday. Took Sunday off for Father’s Day, and put up another post in 1 hour Monday morning. Once I get going, the rest usually is just about plugging away. Figuring out the how is half the battle.

I wish I had a digital camera so I can post pics.

I finished plastering the tops of the walls. I woke up early to work on it a couple of days last week, although in Texas even on longest days the sun doesn’t come up until after 6am, which doesn’t leave me much time to work on it.

Compared to self-engineering involved in designing and executing strawbale and cob walls, running electrical wires is a piece of cake. There are products made to let you do it easily, and tons of info/books/resources. Sometimes, though we have wondered why there are still such few varieties of electrical boxes. And they are not very well-labeld for beginners. It’s a good thing we live 3 miles away from a Home Depot. During wirings we make trips there often, to see if they have parts we didn’t know we needed but we realized we do as we are doing it.

We will be ordering a roof soon, too. We’re going to do another metal roof. That’s going to be easy, too, as the roof on the strawbale is pitched so shallow. I can easily walk on it. The cob house had 12/12 pitch — 45 degrees! That was scary, but I am proud to say our roof doesn’t leak. Woo hoo!

It’s June in Texas, and it’s… hot.

This weekend I finished stuffing loose straw in the gap between the top of the strawbale walls and the ceiling framing. I hold them together by stapling a piece of burlap. Then on Sunday I started plastering the top of the bale walls. Before we can install ceilings, we need to completely enclose the tops of the walls in plaster, so that the straw within are protected from fire and moisture.

Plaster sounds like something fancy (at least to me) but it’s mostly clay. Mix in a bit of sand and shortly cut straw, and we added a bit of Borax for extra protection from fire and bugs. This (without Borax) is the same ingredient as cob/adobe. Just different ratio and more water. The same stuff works for different purposes, I guess.

The bees are still all over the place, new nests popping up everywhere. I’m going to be working around them all summer long. I wish if I could have a friendlier co-existence, but that may be too much to ask.

So, let me catch you up to where we are, this Memorial Day Weekend of 2006.

Current projects: Cob cottage is getting tiled on the ground floor. We dreamed of doing adobe-floor but since we live in it Terri decided that it was too difficult to execute. Tiling, we can do bits by bits. It’s about 15% filed, I’d say.

We also have a solar water heater that’s giving us some grief. One of the pumps, a brand new one I must add, is being erratic. My wife took it apart but can’t figure out what’s going on. The solar water heater also needs a batch water tank in order for it to actually do what we want it to do. If anyone has an old water heater that they can give us for free, please let us know! It doesn’t have to work, though it can’t be leaking.

The stawbale house is fully framed and this weekend I worked on closing up one of the gable ends. The north side. The north side the over hang is very short, mainly because it’s designed to have an add-on later to that side. Now we are not sure if we’ll ever build that wing. In any case, I purchased OSBs to close up the gable ends. I also put layers of tar paper so that the water will not go in. I also repaired damges to the tar paper on the roof. The roof is not finished — it has decking and all, just needs roofing. But my wife couldn’t decide whether to do metal roofing or shingles, and we didn’t know where the money is going to come from. So it’s been sitting there just with OSB decking covered by tar paper. Bad news, I know, as tar paper easily rips when strong wind blows. It’s quite a patch work already.

I also took down all the hornets’ nests from the two cottages. All 12 of them! I got stung once. I feel bad for the bees, but my wife is allergic to bee sting. We can’t coexist. Sorry.

We have a loft inside the cob house, and that’s where we all sleep. Since my wife’s pregnant she’s getting uncomfortable sleeping on our futons (which we just lay on our wooden floor, the Japanese style). So last night we hang her secret weapon — her Mayan cotton hammock. Thanks to this hammock, my wife slept soundly all the way to the birth the last time. But I broke one of our drill bits installing it. I can tell you that I am just about most forgetful and clumsy person I’ve seen. It’s really caused quite a lot of frustration both for myself and for my wife. I am banned from ever touching plumbing, for example.

This week, I’m going to stuff extra straw above the strawbale walls. There’s a space of about 3-4 inches from the top of the strawbale walls and the wooden framing right above it where the walls and the ceiling actually meet. I’m going to stable some burlap on the framing and use it to contain loose straw within the wall framing. I’m planning to get up early and do little bits before I have to come to work.

The goal is to have the strawbale house habitable (notice I didn’t say “finished) by the time my wife gives birth, which is planned some time between Christmas and New Year. I’m hopeful that I can reach that goal, as long as we find financing somewhere.

My name is Ari and I am, well, many things. One of which is a one-half of owner-builders of two still-not-finished cottages. One is made with cob, the other one, strawbale.

Let me catch you up to where we are. My wife, Terri, and I met in college (St. Olaf College) in ’93, at the ripe ol’ age of 19 and 18. We got married in ’96, then moved down to Austin, Texas in the fall of ’97. I’m originally from Tokyo, Japan, she from Hudson, Wisconsin.

Now, Terri, being a daughter of a carpenter father and farm-raised mother, has always been an outdoor, nature-oriented person. One day she found a book in the college library about a strawbale house. She thought it the coolest thing, and did more research from there.

After moving to Austin her desire to build a house ourselves got stronger and stronger. From strawbale her research led her to cob, and she finally convinced me to go take a week-long cob workshop from Cob Cottage Company in Oregon in 2000. After that, we looked for a piece of land around Austin and settled on an 8-acre piece near Bastrop, Texas, 30 miles east of Austin in ’01.

We started on our 200 sq. ft. cob cottage that May, and moved on to the very-much-in-progress cottage in the summer 2002. Our daughter Marie was born in December 2003. We started a second cottage, a strawbale one, in 2005.

And now it’s the summer of 2006. Terri is pregnant again, and our strawbale house is just a shell — we have the foundation, walls (just one layer of plaster on the outside) and roof framing. I’m going to keep a blog on the building process from this point.

Why now, you may ask? Well, there are a couple of things. I am a web designer by trade (with a not-so-secret ambition to be a freelancing musician, but that’s a whole another story) and I always thought it important for us to share our experience. Second, I had actually resigned from all building efforts about 6 months ago. You see, I was quite burned out. While I am proud of what we have done and even prouder of my wife’s initiatives and visions, building (naturally or not) simply isn’t my calling. But with my wife being pregnant and our ever-so-needed second cottage just a shell of what it can be, we decided that it is time for me to come out of my retirement. I am going to finish our house for my wife and my family.

So, I know it’s a journey long-started, but come on board for the rest. I can tell you it’s not always going to be pretty. But it will tell you what it’s like, as honest as I can make it.