It's 66 and rainy today... another BEAUTIFUL Sunday. After working hard outside all week long, the thing we like to do most on Sunday is nap, and there's nothing like a good, rainy all day Sunday to do that . We've had LOTS of rain lately. Praying like crazy that those walls don't come sliding down in a mudslide. The original plan was that the roof would be up BEFORE the cob/cordwooding, but the delay in getting the timbers due to the unusually warm winter (woods were too soggy to get logging trucks in) put us in a position that the walls needed to go up before the roof (in order to beat the frost, which is much more devastating to wet cob than rain). So, we are covering the tops of the walls as well as we can with plastic tarps. We're about 2 weeks behind our target date for getting the walls up, but the guys are a good month behind on the rest of the building.

Our daily routine has been getting up at about 7:30 am (still haven't adjusted to that eastern time zone), having breakfast, doing morning farm and kitchen/cleaning chores, Morning Prayer, and starting work on the house by about 10 am. We usually break for lunch from about 2-3:30, and work again until 7 pm. Then we have a snack and relax for a while, and at about 8:30 get back to farm and clean-up chores until about 9:30. Then we usually visit as a family for a while and pray our Rosary, Chaplet and Night Prayers. Sleep comes quickly after a hard day's work.

Each day, we try to get 6 batches of cob mixed and built. That's enough to build up about 1/4 of an 8 foot wall section. We have changed our cob mix somewhat, so that each batch now contains 1 5 gallon bucket of clay (presoaked), 1 5 gallon bucket of horse manure (somewhat dried and run through a chipper/shredder), 1 5 gallon bucket sand, 1/3 5 gallon bucket fine sawdust, 1/3 c. psyllium powder, 1 tsp. EM ceramic, 1-1/2 c. flour glue, 2 T. rice bran oil, 1/4 c. buttermilk, 1 c. EM. I pre-mix the powders and liquids in 2-batch size containers for convenience.

This new mix has less sawdust and added oil and buttermilk. Cutting back the sawdust makes a prettier wall, but getting rid of it all together caused too much cracking, so we settled at 1/3 bucket instead of a whole bucket. The oil and buttermilk also make for a smoother, prettier wall, and help the water resistance of the wall.

Building with cob in the UP is just a little bit, shall we say, tense, as we know that these hot summer days can quickly turn to frosty nights and the cob has to be well dried by then, or it will puff up like pastry. We decided to alter our cob mix and removed the sawdust because it was slowing down the drying time. The new mix is prettier, points very nicely, but does have a tendency to crack. We may continue to experiment, adding just 1/2 the sawdust that we were using. We also found that collecting dry manure and shredding it the chipper/shredder is making an easier mix to work with.

We have temps near 100 today, but the work must go on as we have fallen behind schedule. The goal was to be done with the walls no later than August 1st, and it's looking like it will be 2 weeks later than that. The earthen floor takes a long time to cure, and then requires 7 coats of linseed oil and drying time between each. We may be living with a REAL dirt floor this first winter.






(No, the posts aren't made of rubber... The wide angle lens distorted the image a bit.)








View out the kitchen window.