Building a Natural Home

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.