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.
