By Christina Nellemann

Some days, don’t you feel the world crumbling around you? Financial crises, world hunger, war, poverty. It seems unending. Some people may feel that one way to escape is to have a small, comfortable place to come home to. A home that is like a hug, warm and alive.

Some people have found that feeling in a cob house. A hand sculpted structure that curves and comforts like the earth it is made from. The House Alive! company is offering workshops for 2009 on how to create your own small structure.

House Alive!, which was started in 2001 by Coenraad Rogmans, James Thomson and numerous volunteers, teaches workshops about natural building, natural design and appropriate technology. They also offer consulting services, do presentations and seminars and work to promote natural building as a real alternative to conventional construction methods.

Cob is a building material that is made of a mixture of sand, straw and clay. The materials are mixed wet, by foot or with a tractor or mortar mixer. The word “Cob” comes from an old English word meaning “Lump” or “Loaf.”

The wet cob mixture is used to build thick earth walls; the building technique is very similar to sculpting with modeling clay. Because cob building requires no forms, you can build your walls into any shape you choose. Curves, niches, arched windows and built-in furniture are common features in cob buildings.

Because cob can be labor intensive, it is best if a cob structure be kept on the small side.

House Alive! will be offering a workshop in May of 2009 on how to build a complete shelter. Participants of the workshop will leave confident that they can design and build their own natural home. The building techniques will include:

• Making cob by foot
• Rubble trench foundations
• Stem walls out of recycled concrete, earth bags, and stone
• Natural sub-floors for earthen floors
• The materials sand, straw, and clay: How they work, what to look for, where to find them
• Wall building: tapering, keeping it plumb, trimming, shaping
• Electricity: How to put in wires, how to build a circuit
• Plumbing: Water and gray water systems
• Windows, doors and hanging cabinets and other things on cob walls
• Hybrid buildings: The interfaces of cob with other materials
• Earthen floors
• Earthen finish plasters

Lectures and demonstrations will include

• The economy of building
• Passive solar design
• Natural design
• Composting toilets
• Solar hot water
• Solar electricity
• Codes, hybrid buildings and natural renovations
• Straw bale construction
• Light straw clay, adobe brick and waddle and daub.
• Roofs and roof insulation
• Simple living and community

One thing that cob building lends itself to is cohousing. Cohousing communities attempt to be as self-sufficient as possible, by building their own homes from sustainable materials like cob and straw bales and by growing their own food. The Emerald Earth Sanctuary in Mendocino County, Calif. makes decisions by consensus, and they value direct, open communication and conflict resolution. They also offer work parties, natural building workshops, and a work trade program.

If you are interested in learning more about cohousing, the 2009 cohousing conference will be in Seattle, June 24-28, 2009.

Emerald Earth Sanctuary

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Solar Cabin

If you’d like to save money on your fuel bills at the same time as doing something to help the environment, switching your home over to solar energy may be the solution. But how should you go about it?

Aren’t solar panels expensive and difficult to install? What if you live in a rented property? What if you live somewhere where the sky is always grey?

The good news is that, with the range of available products continually expanding, there are now solar energy solutions suitable for almost everybody. The cost of using solar energy has dropped considerably as devices which used to be a specialist concern have gone into mass production.

With a seismic shift in public attitudes to solar energy, everything is changing. Big business is aware of the demand for solar energy options by people like you.

Government solar energy initiatives are also helping. If you own your own home, you may be able to get a grant or loan to install solar panels and educe your carbon footprint. Some jurisdictions will allow you to write off the cost of installing solar energy devices against tax.

Installing these devices is much easier than it used to be, with easy home kits available, so in most cases you should be able to do it yourself.

If you live in a rented home, you can alert your landlord to the financial incentives available for installing solar energy devices. Alternatively, you can obtain lightweight solar panels which are designed to be fixed to roofs on a temporary basis.

You can even get solar panels which you can attach to windowsills so that they hang beneath your apartment windows generating solar energy for your use.

The improved efficiency of modern solar energy devices means that they can now be effective even in cloudy environments where direct sunlight is rarely available.

Solar energy has become so easy to access that it’s mazing more people don’t realize how they can take advantage of this great source of free power. Get ahead of the rush and convert your home to solar energy now. You’ll be doing the planet a favor - and you’ll be doing yourself a favor, too.

One person who has applied this to his tiny house is Lamar who built a 14′ x 14′ cabin in Utah. See this post on Lamar.

Lamar has written a book on his own personal experience and he explains in his from his site for $5 and he explains how to build a solar system for a small house for less than $1000. Check out the Simple Solar Homesteading website.

Battery Array

Charge Controller

400 watt Inverter for AC power

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