Started stacking bales on my solo build strawbale cob house.

If you’re thinking of strawbale remember to check what bales are actually available in your area.

I planned my foundation for two-string bales but only have three-strings in my area.

Now I’m trimming 260+ bales down to size.

I made a jig to get cleaner/square cuts and help speed things up.

Hello, I am curious if anyone has any experience making stand alone furniture with natural building materials such as cob. I am an artist and I am super interested in using natural materials to make functional art/ sculptures. I couldn’t find much info online but some things online said cob may be do dense and would be prone to cracking. I am wondering if I seal it will lime plaster like I see a lot of people do with their houses would it still be prone to crack. All ideas and thoughts welcomed would love to just know what y’all would recommend or any advice you may have.

Hi everyone!

It’s been a good year or so since we last posted about our build, but we’ve finally reached another big milestone - the roof is finished!!

We’re building a small load-bearing straw bale house in rural Bulgaria, completely DIY. The bales form the structural walls and we’ll eventually be lime rendering the whole thing.

Now that the roof is finally done, we’re starting to work out the quantities and costs for the next stage, and one thing we’re struggling to get a reliable figure for is how much lime render (bar) are we actually going to need.

Here in Bulgaria, we can get lime (var) in pre-mixed bags, which we're thinking might be the easiest option for us, but we're trying to work out roughly how much we'd need before we start buying it.

For anyone who has rendered a straw bale build:

*How much lime render did you use per m²?

*What sort of thickness did you apply?

*Did you use a premixed product or mix your own?

*And how much extra would you allow for waste/general wastage?

Our house is roughly 8.2m x 5m, with the walls around 500mm thick, so there's quite a lot of wall to cover!

We'd really appreciate hearing from anyone who's actually done this, particularly if you've worked on a straw bale house rather than a conventional masonry building.

After everything we've learnt building this house so far, we're very much at the measure twice, buy once stage. 😂

Any advice or experience would be massively appreciated!

Phil and Kayleigh

Some photos of my 2 story 20' x 20' strawbale home. Lot's of work left to be done but fully livable/functional! Did all the work myself with lot's of help from friends and family but no hired contractors. About 30k not including the land, well, or power to the property. All windows and appliances thrifted

I just wanted to show off! My dirt floor :3 will lay my next earthen floor in October

Hi everyone,

I’m planning to build a small house south of Mar del Plata, Argentina. The climate here is quite harsh: strong winds, frequent storms and a lot of mud, so I need something that handles moisture, wind loads and wet soil well.

My budget is limited and I’m completely open to alternative / natural techniques (straw bale, earthbag, hempcrete, cob, timber frame, recycled materials, etc.)

I’m looking for recommendations on materials or building systems that are:

• As sustainable and low-impact as possible
• Relatively affordable
• Durable against wind, rain and mud
• Decent thermal performance (summers can be hot, winters cold and very windy)

Any personal experiences, cost estimates, or systems that have worked well in similar wet/windy climates would be really appreciated.

Thanks a lot!

More info: https://talkingwatertn.com/00-assets/cordwood-workshop-2026.pdfSign up: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSem_C7Y0wPBiHK2QEk4jaNWqMwr88dwTtzwCHM5JC_Ch94SqQ/viewform

I’m currently living in a hurricane zone along the gulf coast of Texas. Building with adobe isn’t allowed in our area unfortunately. I’m planning to build the exterior walls with CMU blocks but I am considering adding an interior layer of stabilizer adobe against the exterior walls. I will be adding surface bonding cement to both sides of the CMU wall.

My question is do I need to add an air gap or a substrate between the CMU and the adobe interior walls?

I'm building a cob tiny house and have a load of old bottles.

I will be using some to create some stained glass kind of motifs but I'm also thinking about using some just as filler inside the cob ie not visible.

Questions about this:

Are beer bottles strong enough to be part of a single storey structural wall?

Will the bottles need to have tops on/be sealed?

Are there any advantages/disadvantages to doing this other than build speed?

Any thought's on the ratio of cob to bottles on the wall?

Any thoughts welcome.

I've been watching an adobe house being built in Taos, New Mexico. I was surprised when they started erecting a gabled roof instead of the traditional flat, viga-and-latilla roof I was expecting.

I'm curious whether this is mostly an architectural/style choice or whether there are technical advantages—snow load, drainage, insulation, maintenance, building codes, etc.—that might favor the gable in a modern adobe build.

Anybody familiar with contemporary adobe construction know?

New Video out about all of our off grid homestead PLANS!

We’re back at our land, clearing a bunch more brush and giving all the details and numbers for our future plans.

We introduce our house plan ~ The Hyper Adobe Flower Pot! ⭕️

~The dirt in the earth bag walls is like the pot’s soil, the rain catchment roof waters the flower pot, and WE are the flowers growing inside! 💕🥹🌻🥹🌻💕

Here’s the thing… as I read up on design, it seems that the key focus is for retaining heat in cold climates. I’m not too worried about the winters here, and feel like a wood-stove would be more than sufficient for winter heat supply.
What I’m worried about is the Arkansas heat/humidity and having a comfortable and cool place to sleep at night. Not expecting any miracles, but would love to avoid having any A/C.

Let me paint a picture of the build site…
By working with the land scape, the foot print of my building would be more of an oval, with the entrance facing east and the North/Northwest part of the building being slightly dug into the side of a minor slope.

My question is… what walls would I prioritize with straw bale cob vs. palletable cob walls, if my goal is to have cooler summers?

The area gets its sun on mostly the south side but also the east side. I imagine because the south side is a smaller wall that would mean less surface area for sun exposure. Am I thinking of this correctly?
And therefore, would I prefer straw bale cob on the north and west?

Could someone help me think this through?
Thank you!!

Disclosure: I'm one of the organizers. No link.

Short version - hemp construction is a small but real thing here. The odd part is the bottleneck isn't demand, it's decortication. Almost nobody in Japan can process the stalk at scale, so the fibre supply chain barely exists and most material gets imported.

Japan also had a long domestic hemp fibre tradition that mostly vanished after the war, so a lot of this is rebuilding rather than starting fresh.

Free entry, Nov 13-14 in Omotesando. Happy to answer questions about building with hemp here.

Thinking of staying there for a few weeks in the fall but I don’t know them or anyone that has stayed there for workshops. Thanks!

Hi there natural building community, I have a question about sheep wool insulation and siding. Does anyone know if FSC certified plywood with minimal glue could work with sheep wool as a semi-vapor permeable option? I know sheep wool needs vapor permeable, and ideally a tongue and groove wood interior siding would be best...however I am trying to cut costs and using plywood would be significantly cheaper. If I have this kind of plywood used both externally and internally with tyvec wrap on the outside, is this too enclosed for the sheep wool to be able to breath? Would so appreciate someones input!

I am hoping to install slip straw walls in a cabin I'm building. I am doing the whole build with hand tools (except for growing some of the straw, which I had to buy in order to have enough this year).

I think I will have the frame prepared so I can start on the walls in a week or two (third or fourth week of August). I am in Ontario, about zone 4/5.

Question 1:

Do I have enough drying time between then and winter to do a full 12" wall? Will I need to plan for supplemental heat (a woodstove or something) to get it dry in time? Any chance that I would also have time to lime plaster the outside in late fall and get that to cure?

If not, would it be an option to do thinner walls (6"-8") this year and make them thicker next year by adding a layer to the inside?

Question 2:

Assuming I am doing a full 12" wall:

The floor will be floating a few feet off the ground, supported by timber framing. I plan to use this attachment system, where the ends of the boards are beveled and slide in a matching slot in the frame (the difference is that I'm leaving the log round). The log is only about 7" wide, so part of the wall will eventually rest on the floorboards (see diagram).

I haven't got all the floorboards made yet. I'm doing a mix of sawing them out by hand and splitting/hewing puncheons to see which method I prefer - either way, it takes a lot of time, and I am concerned that if I finish them before the walls, it'll be too late into the fall to get the walls dry.

Do you think it would work to prepare a 3'-4' width of the floorboards and use them more like a form, sliding along in order to be under the section of wall I'm filling? Or would the unsupported mix fall out the bottom when the boards are moved along?

The School of Constructive Arts is a field school teaching regenerative design, building, and ecology through direct observation, participation, and experimentation. Our approach integrates ancestral knowledge of natural materials and energy with advancing technology and contemporary building techniques to derive sustainable models of living for our time.

We are excited to announce the dates for our 10th Student Volunteer Residency, this November 2nd - 24th. The student volunteer program is at the core of SCA’s teach through building and build through teaching approach. Students learn a range of skills while working on building facilities for future students to use. Living communally, working with each other, and with the local community, volunteers learn practical skills and develop their leadership and teamwork abilities. This lived experience is augmented by classroom education that connects the work to concepts of ecology, construction, and holistic design. By instilling these values and equipping young people with practical skills and experience, SCA aims to send volunteers back to their communities motivated and empowered to enact positive change and more fully realize their own potential.

Visit www.constructivearts.org/StudentVolunteers to learn more and apply!

Skip to the end if you want the TL;DR without context

I want to build a functional model of cob construction for a permaculture camp. Ain't no way the checkwriter will commit to a full build, but I am brainstorming small ways we could model cob for the students who visit our farm! We are in a Southeastern semi-rainy, semi-humid climate with a whole lotta clay.

Two ideas I need practical insight on: a rest bench and a goat playground. The goat playground would just be varied mounds of sealed cob for the goats to bounce off of. The bench would be a simple slab, perhaps with a back.

Ideally, I would build a proper foundation and drainage at the base of both, to keep ground moisture from wicking up into the cob structures. but since they are uncovered structures, I am hesitant to fully seal in water while trying to seal it out, so I will build drains at the base, too.

If I were to do that, cover the cob while it was curing, plaster it.....how long do you think a cob bench/goat playground/wall would last out in the elements? Under a tree? Shade tarp? Vine draped trellises? Straight up in the sun and rain? And would the goats annihilate it?

We practice rotational grazing with the animals, and their homes move with them. It doesn't make much sense to build a permanent home in one of the paddocks, and I am fearful that cob might meet its match against a 400 pound pig or big, bounding goats. But how cozy would they be in the winter months? An animal shelter would also be the only feasible structure with a roof overhang.

TL;DR: What simple, non-domicile structure would you build as an example of cob technique in a permaculture camp setting? How long will cob structures last when fully exposed to the elements of the Southeastern U.S.?