Fascinating. We’ve been living on our sailboat for over a decade. We make our own electricity with solar. We (mostly) make our water with desalination. We use about 40 gallons of propane per year for heat and cooking. 2021 we burned 82 gallons of diesel and 45 gallons of gas. Compared to most our carbon footprint is tiny. We are getting old enough now to swallow the hook for good. We are not tree huggers per se. But after living in relative solitude and in less than 200 sq ft for so long we feel totally lost in ‘normal’ society and overwhelmed by big houses. And it is actually liberating to live in a small space and learn to take advantage of every sq inch. So we can’t build a cob house but we are buying a small 400sq ft cabin in the woods on 5 acres built in the 40s from local wood and then we are going to use red and white pine and some maple from our own land to add a bit more space. The local Amish builders will do the design and the shell and we will finish the inside. We’ll have a huge garden and some chickens next year (you have provided great info for that) and a few Ferrell cats to keep things interesting. And yep, we are definitely anti authority and always have been. We just don’t quite fit in. So to your point, this plan is part of our way of continuing to reject the parts of society and the world we don’t like. As was being nomads on our boat.
Thanks for all your effort. We will totally be putting some of your ideas to work come planting season next year. If there is a next year. But that’s a missive for another day. Blessing sent your way.
The banksters have certainly been hard at work to rob the little people of their wealth through impossible housing. I have a conventional house in a conventional suburban neighborhood full of crescents and courts and cul-de-sacs which make it nearly impossible to get around without a car. It is designed for and by the automobile manufacturers. I live near a park and trails that enable me to walk my dogs around for recreational purposes, but not to get from point A to point B. I can’t go to the store without driving to get there. I grew up in a neighborhood where the streets were on a rectangular grid and walking to stores, bus stops, schools, churches, etc. was a breeze. No car was really required and my parents used their car for weekend camping trips.
Those days are gone, long gone in the new urban areas. Bigger is better, but is it? I was talking to one lady in line at the cashier in a home décor shop. She was loaded down with bath items. She complained that she was moving into a house with six bathrooms and had to furnish them all. It was a four bedroom house but each bedroom had its own bath. She was not that enthralled with keeping the place clean either as her three kids were not that easy to train.
In other words, we have created more work for ourselves with the impossible dreams of big houses that are not affordable or sustainable. The open area concept is now passe, as the plandemic proved that those areas are impossible to keep clean or tidy if you happen to have a family. Privacy has been lost as well. In my area the price of homes has gotten so out of hand that the dream of home ownership is dissolving rapidly.
I totally like the idea of local and sustainable housing, and in the long run, we will have to go back to that. The whole idea of not depending on the conventional mainstream is where we are headed. Thanks to the eugenicists’ efforts, the population will no longer exist to support the impossible dreams we have been sold which are not as wonderful as advertised. Well, when are things as wonderful as advertised, especially when they are advertised by the marketing geniuses who have no idea of what we really need?
We are entering a new world order, but not one the Davos Elite dream of. The new one will be of sustainability, local, moderate, and cooperative rather than competitive, in harmony with the whole planet and all living things.
Wow, what serendipitous timing - I just visited my friend who is house sitting a cob house today! Before today I had never heard or seen of one before. It was beautiful!
Thank you Kyle. I've studied building biology theory as an advocate BBA, (Institute in Santa Fe) and currently live with my wife in Ontario. If you know of anyone looking for workers, I'd love to know (:
This is a WONDERFUL story of an unconventional but desirable way to live. More articles like this one, please, especially about building a small cob or straw bale house that is cool-ish in the heat of AZ summers. To live outside the control of the Globalists, we need to be off-grid, and this includes water. With what you know now, is it necessary to dig a well for water? Or would a water collection system suffice?
Questions: 1. Is your 'old' blog archive about regenerative farming? If so, is it accessible to readers now? 2. What does the '250,000 needed" in the headline refer to?
When I was a kid I used to design my own houses on paper. Of course I was not aware of the cob method at that time. But what results when someone builds a home for themselves is always amazing.
Corporate is very big, has resources and is very smart. I worry about them a lot. They have a very workable organizational model that has survived for millions of years (I know this makes no sense to the more incredulous among us) and keeps returning to both sustain us and threaten us. We have a sort of love-hate relationship with Corporate. They could embrace concepts like regenerative agriculture, functional medicine, and low-impact housing if they wanted to and probably make them work at their scale. But instead they fight them as if they pose some sort of real threat, which they do not.
So I continue to see corporate sanity as the biggest problem, and not corporate in its most basic form. There are people I know working on this, and though they seem to be making some progress, so far it is not obvious to most of us. I like to think, though, that if those people were not working on this problem, we'd all be slaves by now. That agenda certainly seems quite obvious at this point.
Hey thanks Kyle. That is very kind. We lived in a very small house on a pond for 25 years. We like small spaces. And spent every summer from 1984 to 2009 on our boat. Sadly due to the GFC we had to close our business and ended up in BR in 2008. But we had our boat and since we had always said ‘someday’ we would go cruising, someday just smacked us in the face. So we left MI and headed south, then east, then south. It’s been a blast and it’s been horrible. But that is what you get when you live in (at best) 200 sq ft of space and the weather dictates everything. But we lived dirt cheap, worked a lot of odd jobs along the way, and managed in the end to save a lot of money. We brought the boat back to MI due to Covid making travel difficult, aging parents, and literally surviving a direct hit from Hurricane Florence on 12 September 2018. We said our goodbyes, but a good boat and 45 years of sailing 10s of 1000s of miles together and a lot of prayer and we lived to have another dock story to tell. The past couple years we have spent April-early November on the boat and rented a small house in New Bern NC for the winter. The house has been sold and rental costs are out of sight. So we are looking for property with something under 1000sq ft. So far we’ve found great property with a bad structure. Or a great structure with bad property. But we can afford to be patient and rent for the winter if needed. Anyway that is the short version. Thanks for your note.
Fascinating. We’ve been living on our sailboat for over a decade. We make our own electricity with solar. We (mostly) make our water with desalination. We use about 40 gallons of propane per year for heat and cooking. 2021 we burned 82 gallons of diesel and 45 gallons of gas. Compared to most our carbon footprint is tiny. We are getting old enough now to swallow the hook for good. We are not tree huggers per se. But after living in relative solitude and in less than 200 sq ft for so long we feel totally lost in ‘normal’ society and overwhelmed by big houses. And it is actually liberating to live in a small space and learn to take advantage of every sq inch. So we can’t build a cob house but we are buying a small 400sq ft cabin in the woods on 5 acres built in the 40s from local wood and then we are going to use red and white pine and some maple from our own land to add a bit more space. The local Amish builders will do the design and the shell and we will finish the inside. We’ll have a huge garden and some chickens next year (you have provided great info for that) and a few Ferrell cats to keep things interesting. And yep, we are definitely anti authority and always have been. We just don’t quite fit in. So to your point, this plan is part of our way of continuing to reject the parts of society and the world we don’t like. As was being nomads on our boat.
Thanks for all your effort. We will totally be putting some of your ideas to work come planting season next year. If there is a next year. But that’s a missive for another day. Blessing sent your way.
The banksters have certainly been hard at work to rob the little people of their wealth through impossible housing. I have a conventional house in a conventional suburban neighborhood full of crescents and courts and cul-de-sacs which make it nearly impossible to get around without a car. It is designed for and by the automobile manufacturers. I live near a park and trails that enable me to walk my dogs around for recreational purposes, but not to get from point A to point B. I can’t go to the store without driving to get there. I grew up in a neighborhood where the streets were on a rectangular grid and walking to stores, bus stops, schools, churches, etc. was a breeze. No car was really required and my parents used their car for weekend camping trips.
Those days are gone, long gone in the new urban areas. Bigger is better, but is it? I was talking to one lady in line at the cashier in a home décor shop. She was loaded down with bath items. She complained that she was moving into a house with six bathrooms and had to furnish them all. It was a four bedroom house but each bedroom had its own bath. She was not that enthralled with keeping the place clean either as her three kids were not that easy to train.
In other words, we have created more work for ourselves with the impossible dreams of big houses that are not affordable or sustainable. The open area concept is now passe, as the plandemic proved that those areas are impossible to keep clean or tidy if you happen to have a family. Privacy has been lost as well. In my area the price of homes has gotten so out of hand that the dream of home ownership is dissolving rapidly.
I totally like the idea of local and sustainable housing, and in the long run, we will have to go back to that. The whole idea of not depending on the conventional mainstream is where we are headed. Thanks to the eugenicists’ efforts, the population will no longer exist to support the impossible dreams we have been sold which are not as wonderful as advertised. Well, when are things as wonderful as advertised, especially when they are advertised by the marketing geniuses who have no idea of what we really need?
We are entering a new world order, but not one the Davos Elite dream of. The new one will be of sustainability, local, moderate, and cooperative rather than competitive, in harmony with the whole planet and all living things.
Wow, what serendipitous timing - I just visited my friend who is house sitting a cob house today! Before today I had never heard or seen of one before. It was beautiful!
Yes, yes and yes! Thank you for these dreamy solutions, Kyle! Whenever I have gathered the resources for a small plot of land, cob is my choice!
Thank you Kyle. I've studied building biology theory as an advocate BBA, (Institute in Santa Fe) and currently live with my wife in Ontario. If you know of anyone looking for workers, I'd love to know (:
This is a WONDERFUL story of an unconventional but desirable way to live. More articles like this one, please, especially about building a small cob or straw bale house that is cool-ish in the heat of AZ summers. To live outside the control of the Globalists, we need to be off-grid, and this includes water. With what you know now, is it necessary to dig a well for water? Or would a water collection system suffice?
Questions: 1. Is your 'old' blog archive about regenerative farming? If so, is it accessible to readers now? 2. What does the '250,000 needed" in the headline refer to?
Your photos are great!
When I was a kid I used to design my own houses on paper. Of course I was not aware of the cob method at that time. But what results when someone builds a home for themselves is always amazing.
Corporate is very big, has resources and is very smart. I worry about them a lot. They have a very workable organizational model that has survived for millions of years (I know this makes no sense to the more incredulous among us) and keeps returning to both sustain us and threaten us. We have a sort of love-hate relationship with Corporate. They could embrace concepts like regenerative agriculture, functional medicine, and low-impact housing if they wanted to and probably make them work at their scale. But instead they fight them as if they pose some sort of real threat, which they do not.
So I continue to see corporate sanity as the biggest problem, and not corporate in its most basic form. There are people I know working on this, and though they seem to be making some progress, so far it is not obvious to most of us. I like to think, though, that if those people were not working on this problem, we'd all be slaves by now. That agenda certainly seems quite obvious at this point.
Hey thanks Kyle. That is very kind. We lived in a very small house on a pond for 25 years. We like small spaces. And spent every summer from 1984 to 2009 on our boat. Sadly due to the GFC we had to close our business and ended up in BR in 2008. But we had our boat and since we had always said ‘someday’ we would go cruising, someday just smacked us in the face. So we left MI and headed south, then east, then south. It’s been a blast and it’s been horrible. But that is what you get when you live in (at best) 200 sq ft of space and the weather dictates everything. But we lived dirt cheap, worked a lot of odd jobs along the way, and managed in the end to save a lot of money. We brought the boat back to MI due to Covid making travel difficult, aging parents, and literally surviving a direct hit from Hurricane Florence on 12 September 2018. We said our goodbyes, but a good boat and 45 years of sailing 10s of 1000s of miles together and a lot of prayer and we lived to have another dock story to tell. The past couple years we have spent April-early November on the boat and rented a small house in New Bern NC for the winter. The house has been sold and rental costs are out of sight. So we are looking for property with something under 1000sq ft. So far we’ve found great property with a bad structure. Or a great structure with bad property. But we can afford to be patient and rent for the winter if needed. Anyway that is the short version. Thanks for your note.