10-Day Earthen Building Intensive

The Building Project

We will build a beautiful outdoor shower enclosure and an earthen pizza oven. The shower will be an addition to the bathing area we started last year with our 4D sauna project. While our design is not finalized yet, the curving walls will be about 30 linear feet long and incorporate cob, adobe, waddle and daub, straw bales, slipstraw, cordwood cob and other techniques. It will sit on a rubble trench with an earth bag stem wall to demonstrate an alternative foundation system. We’ll incorporate lots of sculpting in this project and finish with base and finish plasters and clay and lime paints.

At the same time as the walls are going up we’ll build an earthen pizza oven at Prema Farm, an organic market garden that’s on the Rosewater Ranch property. To celebrate the end of the workshop and teach participants how to fire up and use the oven we’ll have a rockin’ pizza party!

Overview

This is one of the most comprehensive natural building workshops you can find. Together, Versaterra instructors have decades of experience on four different continents. This has helped us design rich learning experiences giving students the tools they need to become confident earthen builders.

Earth is the mother of all building materials. For millennia, and all over the world, people have used earth to build beautiful, simple, efficient and inexpensive homes. It’s plentiful, ecological, and non-toxic. Plus, it can’t burn, won’t rot and is much simpler to build with than conventional construction.

We will teach you how to use clay-soil to build just about everything: from strong structural walls (cob and adobe) to plasters and light-straw-clay (slipstraw) walls. Because the materials are fireproof, they are ideally suited to sculpt ovens, fireplaces and cook stoves.

The essence of your learning experience will revolve around developing a deep understanding of how to process and combine a few simple materials: clay-soil, sand, and straw. How you apply that in your building adventures is then up to you, but you will the find the possibilities endless and exciting.

What you will learn

After this workshop, you will feel confident that you can

• Design and build yourself a cottage using cob and other natural materials

• Remodel or renovate an existing home, using natural materials

• Build and use an earthen oven

• Use natural materials to create garden walls

• Teach a one-day natural building event yourself!

Specifically, you will get hands-on experience and skill development in the following areas:

• Foundation systems, rubble trench, stem walls, earthbag construction (as a stem wall)

• Identifying the right materials, screening, processing, testing, costs, amount calculations

• Mixing cob efficiently

• Making adobe bricks and using straw bales (“balecob”) and cordwood cob

• Building with cob: strong sculptural walls, arches, windows and doors, niches, and sculptural artwork

• Electricity and plumbing, how to install wires and pipes in the walls

• Roof attachment and roof design

• Light-straw-clay/Slipstraw: this is an infill technique perfect for code-approved buildings and natural renovations of existing homes. You will learn how to make the right materials and how to install them

• Natural plasters, tools, making your own plasters and paints, colors, applications, how to apply it on earthen walls, drywall, wood, concrete

• Tamped floors, finish earthen floors in natural buildings, earthen floors in existing homes on plywood, oriented strand board, and concrete

• Earthen ovens: from start to finish and how to use them (pizza party!)

• Different design strategies, natural design essentials, passive solar, using cob to make models

• Building codes, how they work, how to work with and around them

• Appropriate technologies like solar showers and thermosiphon hot water systems, composting toilets and an alternative septic system, root cellars, and more

During every workshop we make time for specific issues related to individual situations. This usually includes a careful look at different climates and regions, living with families or in communities, dealing with the building code, physical and financial challenges, appropriate technologies and more.

Kyle’s book, “Build it with Earth: the Cob Pizza Oven” and Conrad’s, “House of Earth” are both included with the workshop and will be mailed before we begin. They will serve as guidebooks for the workshop.