It's 66 and rainy today... another BEAUTIFUL Sunday. After working hard outside all week long, the thing we like to do most on Sunday is nap, and there's nothing like a good, rainy all day Sunday to do that . We've had LOTS of rain lately. Praying like crazy that those walls don't come sliding down in a mudslide. The original plan was that the roof would be up BEFORE the cob/cordwooding, but the delay in getting the timbers due to the unusually warm winter (woods were too soggy to get logging trucks in) put us in a position that the walls needed to go up before the roof (in order to beat the frost, which is much more devastating to wet cob than rain). So, we are covering the tops of the walls as well as we can with plastic tarps. We're about 2 weeks behind our target date for getting the walls up, but the guys are a good month behind on the rest of the building.

Each day, we try to get 6 batches of cob mixed and built. That's enough to build up about 1/4 of an 8 foot wall section. We have changed our cob mix somewhat, so that each batch now contains 1 5 gallon bucket of clay (presoaked), 1 5 gallon bucket of horse manure (somewhat dried and run through a chipper/shredder), 1 5 gallon bucket sand, 1/3 5 gallon bucket fine sawdust, 1/3 c. psyllium powder, 1 tsp. EM ceramic, 1-1/2 c. flour glue, 2 T. rice bran oil, 1/4 c. buttermilk, 1 c. EM. I pre-mix the powders and liquids in 2-batch size containers for convenience.

This new mix has less sawdust and added oil and buttermilk. Cutting back the sawdust makes a prettier wall, but getting rid of it all together caused too much cracking, so we settled at 1/3 bucket instead of a whole bucket. The oil and buttermilk also make for a smoother, prettier wall, and help the water resistance of the wall.