Building
6

Change in Plans…Again…

We have been hard at work on the cordwood house for a couple a months now.  Although it appears to me as though we have hardly been working.  Everything is moving painfully slowly and outside situations keep putting a hold on the the build for one annoying reason or another.  …

Cooking
1

Cob Rocket Stove DIY: # 2

The cob rocket stoves we built last year were our first try with the cob. They worked pretty well, but we wanted to try and make them even better this year. Here goes: The rocket stove that we built out of fire bricks worked wonderfully.  It cost $60 though.  In …

Building
3

Mini Cordwood Build: Building the Clay Sifter

We need a lot of clay and gravel for the cordwood build.  We are going to have to collect and sift through all the clay we need to not only get the smoother clay, but to also get all the gravel out of the caly so we can use that …

Building

Mini Cordwood House: For Practice

Our dream home is a fairly complex natural home with lots of fun additions like an attached green house and an amazing masonry stove as the centerpiece of the home.  This house will take a lot of skills to build.  A lot of skills that we do not currently have.  …

Off Grid Utilities
1

Mini Cordwood House Plans: Energy Efficiency

Being energy efficient is a must for us here on the homestead.  We don’t have the time to waste energy.  This is going to be very important to keep in mind when we build our cordwood house this spring. The most important energy in our home build is heat.  We …

Planning and Goals
1

Mini Cordwood House Planning: Gathering Materials

The last post I did was about observing and interacting with your environment and I talked a lot about finding free resources on our land to do various projects.  The greatest project so far is going to be salvaging materials to build a cordwood house.  Here’s the story of the …

Building
5

Cob Rocket Stove Build

We use our cob rocket stove outside half the year for all of our cooking.  The other half of the year it’s cold out so we cook on the woodstove inside.  We really love the rocket stove, but we could really, really, use another burner.  I decided to try to …

Building
2

Collecting Natural Clay For Building

If you live in an area anything like mine, you have plenty of clay “soil” and hate it.  It is terrible for gardening and makes a huge mess when the kids play in it.  However, clay is an ingredient in cob, which is an amazing natural building material used for …