Part One! Building the cob house at the beautiful Meadow Creek Mountain Rustic Resort in Parrottsville, Tennessee.
What an amazing place for a cob workshop! And even more awesome are the people that live there and the guests we had travel in!
It was a real pleasure to work with everyone there, and the 6-day cob workshop went extremely well for everyone. We all learned a lot, had much fun, and got a lotta building done!
The week before the workshop we had a few issues to deal with though. The building that we were going to be working on was not set up right and would honestly have been a disaster. It would have turned into a muddy hole full of water since the foundation wasn’t done properly.
So we decided, with two days before the workshop, that it would be best to move the building site and start all over from scratch.
It sounds like a lot of work. It was. But it was kind of fun, and a good learning experience for everyone. We definitely had a story to tell with that one!
We dug a rubble trench foundation, set the foundation stem wall in new alignment, and propped up the roof again.
It was totally worth the effort!
Once the workshop began we had no other difficulties, and things went very smooth.
The first day we stomped cob using the tarp method. It’s a tiring process, but its good for learning and getting a feel for how to make cob. Always a good, cheap method…but its just too damn slow!
So out came the tractor! We continued the rest of the week mixing large batches of cob with the Kubota front-end loader tractor. It was at least 10 times faster than the whole group mixing by foot. Our Belgian friend, Peter, was an excellent tractor driver and made a huge help.
We had it to where cob was constantly being applied to the walls and a fresh mix was coming in. It was quite efficient.
In just a week we had 1/3 of the cobbing done, and we had installed some of the door and window frames. Not bad for a 400 square foot cob house!
All week we were served delicious and hearty home-cooked food in the cafe.
Three meals a day like this. It was awesome! Thanks and shout out to all the cooks!
Overall, the workshop was a great success! It was a really great group of people and everyone worked together really well. Meadow Creek Mountain Ranch feels like vacation and is the perfect location for a cob workshop.
Thanks go to everyone at Meadow Creek Ranch for hosting the cob workshop, and thanks to all the great people who came to participate!
If this sounds like something you might be interested in participating in sometime in the near future, stay tuned. Contact Jamie Brandenburg at Meadow Creek Mountain Ranch by email for future inquiries.
Check out these pages for our workshop updates:
This Cob House
www.thiscobhouse.com/cob-workshops/
Meadow Creek Mountain Ranch
http://www.meadowcreekmountainranch.com/
www.facebook.com/MeadowCreekMountain
Great post! Enjoyed the pictures, looks like everyone was having a great time. Thanks for sharing!