I want to talk about cob house cost realities here. Now, I’ve talked about this a couple of times before in the past and it’s sort of my opinion that the cost of building a cob house generally is going to be about the same cost per square foot as a conventional construction. Now, the reasons for that.
One of the main reasons is labor costs. Building with cob or any kind of earthen material is very labor-intensive so that’s going to raise up your labor cost. Unless you’re doing it by yourself as a do-it-yourself builder you’re going to have those extra costs involved. So that’s one good reason to do it yourself. Learning how to do it will save a lot of cost in your building process.
Another reason is there’s just so many components to a cob building or any kind of building. A lot of people just think, okay, the whole buildings made out of cob and cob is a really cheap material-wise, but this isn’t the case.
They’re forgetting all the other stuff. There’s the foundation which is very expensive. There’s the utilities, electrical and plumbing that’s expensive. Windows and doors. That’s expensive. Roofing and bond beam, if you have that. That’s all expensive stuff. Finishing work. That’s expensive. So everything is expensive except maybe the cob walls.
So then the cob walls take money or labor, or labor costs so everything when added up is really going to be the same as conventional construction or more expensive. That’s my opinion. A lot of people would disagree. There are ways to to cut the costs if you’re going to be very frugal with your money. You can use recycled materials. Then you can save a lot on costs. It’s possible but generally, at least the style that I build – I like to build new, I like to build very high quality up to up to high standards for people, so the costs are generally the same or higher.
So I just wanted to put this out there for people to think about. Some realities of costs involved with building with cob or rammed earth, or any natural building material typically is going to be the same or higher. So its something to pre plan for if you’re going to do a project.
And I also wanted to add that there could be more cost involved as far as permitting and coding and then whatever your team is you might have to hire an architect or an engineer. So you might have other people apart from just builders. So the costs can really add up with building, unfortunately.
It’s one of the unfortunate realities of the society we live in is the cost of building can be extremely high. There are ways around a lot of these things but it really takes research and education on these topics. You can save money as far as permitting goes and not having to hire architects and engineers if you live in certain regions or certain counties where building codes are much more lax or non-existent, but in a lot of places you’ll have to get permitting and go through the building department and get inspections done and all these things add costs.
So for those of you out there who think you’re going to build with hardly any money, like a couple thousand dollars for a house, the reality of that is it’s going to be very difficult in most cases. You can build a nice small house for anywhere between twenty to fifty thousand dollars.
So if you have land and there’s not high regulations as far as the coding goes I would say you can build a nice house out of natural materials for somewhere in that range. There are so many variables to the cost of a home, but generally I just I tell people, from my experience, that you’re not going to build very very cheap. You’re not going to build a house for $500 or $1000. That’s highly unlikely and it’s not going to be very nice, to be honest!
So I would look in the range of conventional construction costs and possibly even higher due to the nature of the material you’re trying to work with and the fact that its not very well known. You’ll have to educate the building department.
