GATHERING MATERIALS

Remember, for thousands of years people have used what they had and what they could find to build their homes. What follows is a fancy list of all the things you could possibly want while building. The more of this stuff you collect before you start construction, the fewer times you'll have to stop once you get started.

Essential stuff

• a reasonably healthy body or the power of persuasion and friends with reasonably healthy bodies
  
  
• a fairly determined, flexible brain
  
  
• friends to help
  
  
• water for cob and a way to transport it: hoses, nozzle, faucet (tap), buckets, water source
  
  
• drinking water
  
  
• a place to store things from the elements
  
  
• stones for foundation or whatever you're using for a foundation (like tires, broken concrete pieces, mortar, forms if you're pouring your foundation, etc.)
  
  
• gravel and perforated pipe or tile for the drainage ditches
  
  
• sand, clay and straw (See how to make cob, starting on page 78, to estimate how much you'll need of each.)
  
  
• a vehicle, ideally a pickup truck, or at least a friend with one
  
  
• little tarps, approximately 7x9 feet or bigger, for mixing cob
  
  
• cobbing tools: squirt bottles, sticks and/or stones to massage the cob together, machete, meat cleaver, and burlap bags or tarps to cover the cob (See pages 51 and 77 for more specific tool lists.)
  
  
• big bits of wood to span door and window openings if you are not arching the cob over the openings (See the section on lintels page 107.)
  
  
• roofing stuff: wood, rafters, sheathing and insulating stuff (See roof chapter beginning on page 123.)
  
  
• windows, a modern "necessity"
  
  
• door(s), and wood for door frame(s).
  
  
• step ladder or two, 6 foot or taller
  
  
• lots of big buckets, multipurpose

Other useful stuff

• carpentry tools: hammer, nails, saw, square, pencil, tape measure
  
  
• leveling tools: level, taper wedge for the level, long straight 2x4, clear plastic tube for the water level (See page 60.), string
  
  
• earth moving tools: wheel barrow, shovels, pick, hoe
  
  
• plumbing and electrical stuff if you plan to have them, and pipe to run through the walls or foundation
  
  
• stuff to set up an on-site kitchen if there isn't one to use near by, at least coffee and tea making stuff
  
  
• big tarps to cover the site, (or build the roof first)
  
  
• string
  
  
• rope for putting up tarps
  
  
• scrap wood for bracing and scaffold supports, planks and extra straw bales for scaffolds
• sill materials: flat stones, brick, tile
  
  
• Piles of lovely things on site while you build will inspire the artist in you. pretty things to bury in walls: hooks, rocks, tiles, seashells, magic things, colored glass, and colored bottles.
  
  
• 
  gracefully shaped wood for hangers, hooks, curtain rods, decorations shelves
  
  
• plastering stuff: swimming pool trowel, mortar trowel, smooth burnishing stones, pretty colored clays, manure from grass eating animals, pigments, charcoal for black pigment.
  
  
• hydrated builders' lime if you want to whitewash