Natural Building and the Timber Femmes (with photos)

I spent a few days recently visiting my kid at Dancing Rabbit, an ecovillage in Missouri. She's working on a crew that happens to be all women, I heard them referred to as the Timber Femmes which made me smile. I wanted to share some photos from my first day there. The first morning I was there, we scrounged some screens and hand sifted sand to take out pebbles and weeds:



Then we mixed the cleaned sand with a sloppy wet clay - using our feet instead of gas or electric powered mixers:



Then the women put straw in a metal drum and attacked it with a weed whacker to break it into pieces. (I think they were running the weed whacker off the solar panels.) We stomped that into the clay/sand mixture to make cob. That's my clay encrusted foot at the bottom of the frame.



By afternoon we were ready to do the finish layer of a floor - hand packing the cob into buckets to bring it inside, hand patting and smoothing it onto the floor, and using traditional and laser levels and large trowels to even it out:



The whole floor was done in a day start to finish, but it did need a week to cure. Here's how it looks:

I was there for 4 days, their food co-op charged me the going rate since I was visiting family - $5 a day for food. They've got about 20 people in the co-op. They use a community kitchen since a lot of them don't have their own kitchens, and they have rotating shifts, 2 people per day cook for the group of 20. That way they don't have to buy appliances for 10-20 kitchens and run all those stoves. It's just common eating, people know what time to gather for meals. About every 10 days they get stuck with a day of cooking, and the meals are really good because if you're only cooking every week and a half, you tend to put more thought into what you are making. People worked to outdo each other. (Vegetarian) Sushi night got a round of applause at the table when I was there.

Four years ago, when my eldest grandson was 12, I took him for 11 days to a workshop where we built a cob cabin. It was an outstanding experience.

I am mainly living vicariously through my kid this summer. :)

She rode her bike today 60 miles in the 102 degree heat (according to a bank sign she passed) to get to a train station to skip out to Pennsylvania to finish a cob house for a friend there, then she's returning back to dancing rabbit. The whole biking 60 miles in the Missouri heat is one of those things I'm happy to experience second hand - she took me on a 20 mile ride there last week and it damn near killed me. I did not know Missouri was all rolling hills, I'm spoiled here in the land of flatness.

I posted this photo in another thread, but this was their large oven, it's mounted on casters for turning.


Plus they had another 5 smaller commercial sun ovens that I saw. But most of the cooking was done I believe with propane.

What color does the floor dry to?

Does it lighten up like concrete or will it stay dark like that?

The oops is...unless I misunderstood the caption, the bottom pic is a week later of the cured floor?

That answers my question if so.

the day I had to grab my kid around the waist while she leaned waaaaaay in with a broom stick to retrieve her guitar she accidentally left on the window sill, and needed for the community "no talent show" that night. :)

I do have a photo of another angle of the room though which shows the natural plaster on the walls:



They can also be painted. I stayed on site in the bed and breakfast there, also off the grid and entirely solar powered - here's a photo of my room there:

I told my kid if she finds herself between jobs, I'll hire her to build me a greenhouse. If I wanted a house, I'd be hiring her for that. The timber femmes have been working on all sorts of projects, including some more traditional skills, digging foundations (without bulldozers), pouring cement forms, etc.

It just kind of happened that she ended up on a work exchange team of all women but I'm really happy it worked out that way for her so she's not stuck with traditional women-in-construction jobs like holding the slow flag out on the street or filling out paperwork.

I pour concrete floors often and this is a great alternative. How hard does the floor get?

but from what I saw of the rougher underlayer, it felt like a normal floor - but it's supposed to be softer on your feet than something like tile, and you aren't supposed to drag furniture across it (put felt bottoms on the furniture legs), and you aren't supposed to run around in high heels on it. I don't imagine there are a lot of high heel wearing cob house owners though.

This one was supposed to take a week to cure, I've seen online where others can take up to a month or more, I assume depending on thickness along with how wet the mix they used was. Some people will finish it with boiled linseed oil to help make it more waterproof.

also from the bed and breakfast. This is the toilet. I know, not something you'd normally take a photo of, but I wanted to show that it looks like a regular commercial toilet - except notice there's no flushy thing. That's because it's a composting toilet. The only kind of compost toilet I'd heard of before was the kind that's basically a toilet seat on a bucket and you toss a layer of sawdust on top after doing your business. But this wasn't like that - no sawdust, there was some kind of fan inside it (run off solar like everything else), and there was absolutely no smell and no special nonsense you had to go through to use it, and it absolutely did not smell at all, much to my surprise. If you're someone who has to pee in the middle of the night and you don't like the loud FLUSH that wakes up the household and announces to the world that you're up and you're PEEING!!!, this was awesome for its stealthy calm quietness.



and directions for it. :)