Building the Cob Chicken Coop!

Two weeks into our stay, William and Angie decided we could start a cob building project. We had talked about starting a guest cottage, but in the end it seemed better to start with a smaller project: a new chicken coop! Anthony and DJ are digging post holes here so that a roof can be put on before we start the cob, in case it rains before the cob dries.


Here's the structure a day later... roof rafters up, and Jen & Kathy had done some cob for one of the walls (front wall, near wheel barrow). The front wall and half the long side wall will be chicken wire, while the back wall and other half of the long side wall will be all cob.


This shows the start of the cob for the two walls that will be all cob. The book we read about cob building said you can add about a foot a day. Actually, William said we were actually using the "waddle and daub" method, rather than cob, although the mixture of clay, straw, and sand is the same. Apparently cob construction requires thicker walls, two feet thick in order to hold itself up. Waddle and daub can be made with a thinner wall because a lattice type structure is made to mold the cob to and help hold the wall up. You can see all the sticks in this pictures, weaved in and out to create the structure to pack the cob around! Pretty cool.

Here's the structure from another angle!
We built it up only a bit higher than this pictures shows, as we didn't have enough time to build more, especially with our last week being Thanksgiving week! It's too bad we didn't start this project until more than half-way into our stay at Los Arboles. But we still got the basic idea about how to build this way, and other volunteers will have a great project to work on!