Luck and True Love

 

By: Misty Murph'Ariens

 

I am a very lucky woman. My husband knows and totally understands that I have loves other than him. In fact, it is through my love of others that we come to love each other better. For example, I am totally in love with our horse, Kodjisaam. I am in love with my Jersey cow, Gaeabelle. I am in love with food. But, I think my oldest and deepest love is for the earth. I love to dig my hands in beautiful rich loam while gardening. I love the cool caress of earth on my feet, so I spend as much time as possible barefoot—even while doing my farm chores. I was barefoot on my wedding day. In school, my favourite class was art, and in art my favourite activity was clay sculpting. Imagine my thrill to learn that I could sculpt my house from clay. Indeed, it is a true earth enthusiast who lives in a house made of earth. When I discovered cob—a building technique using an amalgam of clay, sand and straw, mixed by foot and sculpted by hand—I thought I must be dreaming. It has a tradition of use going back hundreds, sometimes thousands of years in virtually every place on the planet. It is fire-proof, pest-proof, non-toxic and hypoallergenic. It requires almost no tools, can be done by almost anyone and can be completely free if the materials are harvested on-site. The buildings made of this amazing stuff can last hundreds of years. One skyscraper—yes SKYSCRAPER—made of cob is over a thousand years old and has been continuously habitated the whole time. Many cob houses in England have been lived in for six hundred years without the cob being in need of repair. When these houses do fall down, they will be able to go directly back into the cycle of fertility, much unlike our modern buildings which are highly toxic for years after demolition. The embodied energy of a cob house is low, since it is represented in the straw and the wood used in the roofing. This is also VERY unlike modern houses, which have an enormous amount of embodied energy in their production. Although they can be any size, cob houses tend to be small since they are often built by their inhabitants using only hand tools to dig the clay and sand. This makes them energy-efficient to heat and cool. They also don't need very much heating or cooling because they are incredibly thermally massive. The walls absorb and radiate thermal energy at a rate of one inch per hour. So, if you heat a cob house for 12 hours and it has walls 24” thick (the temperature is coming from the outside too), then it will radiate the heat back for 12 more hours without having to stoke the fire. This isn't all cob can do, though. Cob is also hygroscopic. This means that it draws humidity through itself constantly, always equalizing the humidity between either side of the wall. The upshot of this is that all the moisture that is generated within the house (from cooking, showering, perspiring, etc.) is conveniently whisked outside, preventing condensation and mold. Practicality aside, cob is easily the most beautiful builing material I have ever worked with. You know those quaint little cottages that Disney princesses and mythical creatures live in? Cob. It can be formed into any shape and the urge to spontanously sculpt can take you at any time during building, making the finished project enchantingly unique. I live in a one-of-a-kind home, borne of the earth of my property and lovingly sculpted by my hands and those of my loving husband. I am a very lucky woman. To learn more about cob building, search online: the Cob Cottage Company, read The Hand Sculpted House, or contact me (mistyariens@live.com , 519-313-0403) for details about upcoming cob workshops.