Tiny House Blog

Review by Kasey March

About two months ago my boyfriend, Shane, sent me an odd text, “Can you take off from work July 8 – 11?”

“I think so, why?”

“We’re going on vacation.”

And so began the Super Secret Vacation saga. For weeks I guessed where we might be going and worried about what to pack.

“Are we camping?”
“Maybe.”
“Ok, we’re camping. We can’t be going South – it’s too hot. Are we hiking?”
“Maybe”
“Do I need a bathing suit?”
“Yes.”

And on it went until July 8th when we got into the car. All I knew was that we were camping in West Virginia. But what on Earth was in West Virginia?

When we pulled into Taproot Farm (taprootfarm.info) I thought we were lost and asking for directions to a nearby state park. Then I met Beth Reese, a gracious and friendly woman who greeted us as if we were old friends – not strangers who had just pulled down her long drive way, uninvited, to ask for directions. She and Shane were chatting away when I saw Sigi Koko’s green VW bug with Build Naturally scrawled across the back bumper. It clicked.

Querencia

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This movie is entitled “Off The Treadmill” and is about getting out of mortgage debt by using the very ground we stand on to build our own homes. “It’s dirt cheap”, says Ianto Evans, master cob builder and architect at Cob Cottage in Southern Oregon. This film was created by Chris Tilt.

Earth is still the world’s most common building material. The word cob comes from an old English root meaning a lump or rounded mass. Cob building requires the use of hands and feet to form lumps of earth mixed with sand and straw. This is a sensory and aesthetic experience similar to sculpting with clay. Cob construction is easy to learn and is inexpensive to build. Because there are no forms, ramming, cement or rectilinear bricks, cob lends itself to organic shapes: curved walls, arches and niches. Earth homes are cool in summer, warm in winter. Cob’s resistance to rain and cold make it ideally suited to cold climates like the Pacific Northwest, and to desert conditions.

This roundhouse, built of cordwood, cob, straw and recycled windows, is located in southwest Wales and owned by Tony Wrench. It’s not only a low impact, natural dwelling built with what was on hand, but it’s become a symbol for the rights of natural builders within the United Kingdom.

The house was built in 1997 by Tony and featured solar power, a wind turbine, composting toilet and reed beds for gray water. Tony based this house on American Indian designs he had seen in history books. In the past, he had had experience building “wacky structures” and wanted to live as close to the land as possible. Even though he built it inside Pembrokeshire Coast National Park, with agreement from the owners of the land, he never got permission for the structure from the local planning board. After several court appearances, he and his partner, Jane, decided to demolish it in 2004, but changed their minds after public demonstrations persuaded them not to. The Pembrokeshire Coast National Park Authority attempted to get a court injunction to force Tony to demolish it, but were persuaded to allow it to stay up until July 2006, when they could re-apply under the new Low Impact Policy. In 2008, the committee voted to give Tony a conditional for three years. So – the roundhouse still stands. Continue Reading »

For next summer, I’ve been looking at taking a cob building workshop to update my building skills, learn some natural building techniques, and get closer to the natural world. The process of building a tiny house out of earth and found materials is very appealing. While doing my research, I came across a few tiny cob houses that I thought epitomized how warm, human-scaled and friendly they can be. Some of these were so beautiful, I just had to share.

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Following is a guest post by my friend Tammy Strobel who publishes the Rowdy Kittens Blog.

Shift is an organization in Portland that brings people together for bike based fun. Every year Shift facilitates an amazing event called Pedalpalooza, that spans a 2 week period.

With 291 events, most organized by individuals, bikers of all persuasions are likely to find many events of interest. Nearly all events are free.

A few weeks ago Eli Spevak, from Orange Splot, LLC, organized a Pedalpalooza ride featuring tiny homes. A group of 150 cyclists gathered for the tiny home tour, in Southeast Portland.

Beginning of Ride

We stopped at six tiny homes and saw a number of different housing styles, including: a 14 x 8 gypsy wagon, a little house made of cob, a nanny’s house on wheels, a straw-bail tiny house that is being used as a detached bedroom, an urban village, and a cute little home that was converted from a garage to a little cottage. Continue Reading »

Ziggy, who built his own cob house sent me a note telling me about his visit to the the Cob Cottage Company in Oregon.

He just put up a post with a slide show of pictures of his visit. He went to visit Ianto Evans and Linda Smiley in their home in Coquille, Oregon.

Ianto and Linda are two very influential cob building pioneers in North America, and authors of The Hand-Sculpted House, the number one go-to book for cob construction.

Be sure and watch his slide show and read his post as he covers a lot of good information on cob building and what he learned from his visit. Here is what Ziggy came away with from his visit: Continue Reading »

In the fall of 2007 my wife Lin and I gave up our condo and pitched a tent in an Iowa field to live immersed in nature and without debt.

The tent was soon flattened by a thunderstorm and replaced with a tow behind camper that we picked up on ebay for $700. Even with a tiny woodstove, the camper wasn’t up to an Iowa winter so we journeyed to Oregon where the summer before we had done cob building workshop with Ianto Evans and Linda Smiley.

Cob is an ancient building method that combines clay soil, sand and straw in a free form, frameless structure. The typical thatched cottage of southern England was built with cob and Ianto, a 70 year old Welshman, has led the cob revival. The book he wrote with his wife Linda and Michael G. Smith is aptly titled, The Hand-Sculpted House. Modern cob structures often take full advantage of cob’s sculptural possibilities with curving walls, dragon reliefs and frog mouth pizza ovens.

When Lin and I returned to Iowa early in the spring (actually, a little too early), we started digging a foundation for our own cob cottage. We had no intention of trying to stuff all our activities into a small house. By this time we had built an open shed out of recycled wood and roofing to house a summer kitchen, outdoor shower and workshop. We had no desire to move indoors but we didn’t want to be forced to travel all winter either. So we designed a 14 by 18′ winter room with a high pitched roof to give us a sleeping loft.

Our photo website http://www.pbase.com/hapm/ourhouse has details of our building process. In Iowa the subsoil is high in clay, great for building but not good for drainage. Our gravel foundation drains to daylight as does a curtain drain around the high side of our building site. After starting the walls with old concrete and limestone, cobbing began on June 1, 2008. For the next 10 weeks our days began with muddy feet as we mixed our house, batch by batch on tarps. Many new friends would be made doing the cob dance. This must be the most low tech way to build a permanent structure. Whole families joined in and even two year toddlers were able to contribute.

By the end of August the roof was on and we were no longer losing sleep trying to keep our cob covered from the Iowa rains. After another two months of plastering and doing the cob floor, we moved in, just in time to crank up the woodstove. We spent $7,000 on the house and none of it was for labor. Most of the money went into the windows and roof system.

In the “developed” world, houses are made to be plugged in to existing infrastructure. The modern house doesn’t function without connections to water, sewer, electric power and often natural gas. This dependency on infrastructure strikes me as a huge risk considering the current potential for environmental and economic changes and to say nothing of Murphy’s law. In our little house we filter rainwater for drinking. We heat with scrap wood. Our electricity comes from a small photovoltaic system. Our only connection to anything is a phone line. Because our lifestyle is a small step away from camping we are quite content with our minimal facilities.

Tiny houses will play a big role in creating a sustainable future for mankind on earth. Almost half of our countries carbon footprint is caused by the manufacture and maintenance of our structures. For Lin and I, the tiny house is part of our goal to live cooperatively in nature. Based on the hundreds of people who have visited and helped with our construction, this is clearly a shared vision.

We are coming to the end of our second building season on the land. Two more houses have sprung up. One is a strawbale house that we are helping to build for my folks with Brad Young the paid main builder. The other is a 14×14′ bedroom/house that we are building with our daughter Anna. http://www.pbase.com/hapm/annahouse This bale/cob hybrid will have a living roof and will cost half as much as our house. The wall building that took 10 weeks with our cob house took one week with Anna’s bale/cob. The bales in the walls will have a much higher insulation value than straight cob. Anna will use her grandmother’s kitchen and bath, another example of sharing and saving.

By Hap Mullenneaux for the (Tiny House Blog)

Cob Loft Bed

Cob House Kitchen

Wood Stove and Stairs

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