Natural Building Options for Homesteaders

If you’re considering building your own home, outbuildings, or other structures like an outdoor kitchen, you’ll want to take a look at natural building options. Natural elements like clay, straw, sand, and lime can provide you with a more renewable source of building materials that can often be handled in a DIY way that won’t break the bank. Since they’re organic, they can also offer a healthier home option for your family. Here are some of the various natural building types and techniques you might want to consider.

A Natural Building Caveat

The first thing I should clarify is that natural building options can end up being about the same in cost as a conventional build if you’re hiring out the design and labor. If you’re expecting to save a substantial amount of money by using a natural building option, you might be disappointed, at least in some measure.

Everything costs money!

However, there are many other benefits to natural buildings that, while having a comparable cost, might end up having far more value to you than their conventional counterparts.

Also, you can save money by doing much of the work yourself, if that’s something you want to take on. Be advised that it will slow down the process! However, it will also make the project far more meaningful while it’s saving you labor costs.

Disclosure:

I’m still in the middle of my natural building education and am not a builder by trade. Much of my infant knowledge has come from books and videos on the internet.

The bulk of my burgeoning experience has come from attending hands-on workshops at Build Naturally & Down to Earth Design with Sigi Koko in Pensylvania every summer. I’ve taken most of her classes but still have several pivotal ones I hope to take as time and money allows.

Sigi is a natural architect with decades of experience in natural design, building, and education. She is THE BEST teacher I have encountered on this topic! She’s actually one of the best mentors I’ve had the pleasure to work with on any topic, to be honest.

–>> I highly recommend her workshops and her facebook page to further your education on the topic of DIY natural building.

Natural Building Perks

Natural buildings are made from renewable materials, in whole or in part. For example, when I want to mix cobb to build an outdoor oven, I simply dig a pit deep enough to reach my native clay. I mix that with sand and chopped straw and, voila, I have cobb with which to build.

–>>You can learn to build your own outdoor pizza oven with cobb!

These materials are so local that I can source them from my own land, especially the clay. Clay exists on pretty much every continent on earth, which makes it a local natural building resource for anybody. Sand is also prevelant in native dirt.

Stack Funcitons with Natural Building

Another positive aspect of natural building materails is that they perform more than one function for the home and homestead (in permaculture, we call this stacking functions).

For example, clay is a natural building material but it also regulates temperature and humidity in the home. Clay has an almost magical ability to move water, drawing water into itself and then releasing it slowly over time. If you have a clay plastered bathroom, you won’t end up with steam after a shower, for example.
This is because clay is hygroscopic, which simply means that it’s able to draw water into itself.
Clay can also act as a battery for heat in the winter. If you charge it with sunlight or with nearby wood heat, it will store the heat and release it slowly over time.
Clay will do the same in the summer but the effect is cooling because the heat is slowly and evenly shared throughout the day and night.
As if that weren’t amazing enough, clay is also antibacterial and anti-fungal. As is lime, which is most typically used for plaster (a finish coat) on interior and exterior walls.

As another layer of versatility, clay can be used as an element for building structure (as with cobb or rammed earth), but it can also be used as a plaster to cover walls (as with straw bale).

Because of their source, natural building materials are often much more hypoallergenic than conventional materials. If you suffer from mold allergies, use clay or lime plasters that repel mold and prevent its growth!

Natural Building Starter Projects for Homesteaders

We’ll touch on more benefits, but if you’re completely new to natural building, I want to stop and go over a few type of natural buildings and methods from which you can choose. The good news is that you can combine several different methods and try out ones that interest you.

For example, if you’re really interested in building an outdoor pizza oven from cobb, you can start with a much smaller project and work your way up. This gives you hands on experience with the elements of cobb (clay, sand, straw) and gives you the practice you need to get use to using the materials.

–>>Start with a simple clay ball, like these dorodango balls.

Then, work you way up to a fairy house, or a mailbox, or a doghouse.
Next, make a miniture pizza oven as Kiko Denzer directs in his book Build Your Own Earth Oven.

The more hands on practice you have, the more confidence and skill you’ll build up for your final project.

Natural Building Considerations for Homesteaders

I’m going to briefly cover some natural building options for homes, barns, and other buildings. Full discloure: I repeat, I am most familiar with cobb, straw bale, and both clay and lime plasters.

I research other methods, but my hands-on experience is with these. The reason for this is because of my climate and the materials most available to me locally.

Because I have cold winters and very hot and humid summers, the most important function for me in a naturally built structure is temperature control.
Although, humidity control and mitigation runs it a close second.
The next most imporant factor for me and my family is affordability of materials near me.
Lastly, the availability of materials in my area.

You may have very different metrics you use to measure the type of natural building you want – and that’s perfectly fine! Just know that for the purposes of the discussion, these are the most important factors to me. (So, you’re sort of stuck reading about them.)

Here are some of the most common natural building options for modern day homesteaders. Some are relatively new on the scene, while others have been used for hundreds (even thousands) of years.

Strawbale

There are basically two kinds of strawbale structures you could build.

A structure made entirely of straw bales fastened together to form the walls of the building. This requires very tight engineering and design. Because there is no (to minimal) wood framing around the bales, it’s important that you follow the design precisely. Plasters are applied to finish the straw walls.
Or a standard wood-framed structure with the bales acting as insulation/in-fill. This is the method that would be the most familiar to someone with previous building experience and is, in my opinion, the easiest for a DIY homesteading family. These walls are also finished with plasters.

Either way, because of the thickness of a standard square bale, the R-value of a typical straw bale build is upwards of 60. These buildings are also:

Fire-resistant
Breathable
Beautiful (with deep window wells and thresholds due to the thickness of the bales)

Because the walls of straw bale buildings are usually finished in clay or lime, they’re also anti-fungal and very capable of regulating temperature and humidity. The bales can be custom trimmed to create soft corners and archway doors, or many other flights of whimsy.

I love these buildings for their deep aesthetic appeal and calming feeling.

Cobb

Cobb (also spelled cob) buildings are most suitable for dry, hot climates, where you will find them naturally occuring throughout history. Some native structures are still in use from hundreds of years before.

As I mentioned before, cobb is a mixture of clay, sand, and straw. There are other possible additives, but that’s the basic mix.

The key with cobb is to be sure you’ve experimented with your mixture so that you can be confident that your structure will stand the test of time. Usually, if you have a structural failure with cobb (especially as a novice), it will be because your sand content was either too high or too low.

Sand prevents cobb (or any clay mixture) from cracking and falling apart, but too much can cause problems, too. Like I said, pick a small project and start practicing!

The main benefit of cobb is that you can usually source the materials from your own land! Because it includes clay, cobb has all the benefits already mentioned when you use this awesome natural material.

People often confuse cobb with adobe and that’s not surprising since they’re very similar. They’re are some differences, though.

Cobb is laid down usually by hand in great globs and smoothed in place.
Adobe is native mud formed into bricks and baked by the sun. These bricks are then fixed into place.

The main difference in the material of the two is straw (in cobb), although adobe may have bits of dried botanical material.

Read the article Cob vs. Adobe from Off Grid World to learn more.

Cobb can be used inside the home to simply build walls or surround areas for masonry heaters and ovens. These walls act as batteries, like I mentioned before. If built around a heater, they absorb the heat and share it out over a long period of time to regulate the temperature in the home.

There are so many possibilities with these natural materials!

Cordwood

Cordwood houses are like log cabins with more artistry. The technique involves using prepared cordwood (straight trees devoid of branches and bark and trimmed to size) and masonry to bind them together.

Though not as insulative as bales, these houses are gorgeous and very adaptable to your imagination, like most natural buildings. My favorite down-to-earth resource for information on cordwood building comes from Accidental Hippies.

You can get Emily’s free Cordwood Building Guide when sign up for her newsletter. This guide is written for normal homesteaders like you and me, so you don’t have to worry that it will be over your head.

Earthships & Others

The main focus of an earthship home is typically to create a passive-solar living space that functions off-grid and is made from recycled and upcycled materials like steel and tires. I don’t consider them a natural building option because the materails used are typically manmade, but they might be a viable option for you.

Passive solar is a design technique that capitalizes on the movement of the sun and its intensity throughout the year. These designs seek to draw in the low-lying sun of the winter to heat the home and to block and difuse the high heat of the sun in summer.

Mother Earth News can take you through the Pros and Cons of Earthships, if you’d like to learn more.

Another method to consider is rammed earth, which builds structure by using forms similar to concrete forms and then, literally, ramming dirt until its so compact it holds its form. This seems like magic to me but it actually works! There are even rammed earth sections of the Great Wall of China, which goes to show how old the technology can be across the globe.

The “dirt” used in rammed earth is actually a careful blend of clay, sand, and silt and some other sand bits as large as gravel*. It’s not super great at insulating, so if you live in a cold climate that’s something to consider. Arch Daily has a good dirt-nerdy article about how rammed earth walls are built.

*The technical difinition of sand is sedimentary material, coarser than silt, with grains between 0.06 and 2.0 millimeters in diameter. For natural building purposes, you want rough sand, or structural sand, so that the pieces lock together with their craggy, rugged bodies. Never use play sand or river sand because the granules are too smooth and rounded.

Unless you want your hard work to tumble down around your ears, that is.

Then there are a number of natural and hybrid-natural building options that exist all over the earth and that are as varied as the imaginations of the people who design and build them. The nuances of these buildings are often determined by the materials available in the local environment and the timetable of the humans involved in putting them together to create shelter.

Do you have a favorite natural building design that I’ve neglected to mention? Toss it down in the comments to benefit other readers!

A Word on Plasters for Natural Building

Plasters are used to finish walls, both inside and out, and give them a seamless surface that looks lovely and is smooth to the touch. When applied to the outside of a natural building, and if using a material like lime which hardens to stone, a plaster can also provide some weather and wear proofing.

If you attend one of Sigi’s workshops, one of the first things she’ll teach you (as will any natural builder worth their salt), is that nothing will compensate for a missing hat or missing boots on a naturally built house.

What does she mean?

Good Hat = A water-tight roof that has been sealed up all around and provides an overhang that prevents precipitation from falling straight down onto a natural building.
Good Boots = A properly constructed foundation that keeps the natural materials up off the ground and protects the foundation from water infiltration and a lot of splashback.

Water is the nemesis of any building, not just naturally built ones.

However, if you have water beating directly down onto a cobb house, for example, that water will eventually penetrate through the material. This will lead to failures, especially if that water ever freezes! Water is larger as a solid than it is as a liquid and once it freezes inside your cobb (or plaster or whatever), it will basically blow out the structure.

Whatever natural building option you decide on, be 100% positive that your roof and your foundation are built correctly.

Good hat, good boots = happy home.

Source Your Plaster Materials Well

The first thing to know about plasters is that the natural materials used to make them, namely lime and clay, are just that: natural. Which you can read to mean variable, non-uniform, not-industrially-produced when coming out of the ground. These materials need to be prepared for use in natural building.

As Jon from Lancaster Lime Works taught us during his lime plaster workshop,

Lime isn’t lime isn’t lime.”

What he meant is that the lime is different from region to region, even from one neighborhood to another. Which means it’s very important that you purchase lime for your plaster, or lime plaster mixes, that are reliable and simple to use.

I can certainly recommend Lancaster Lime Works since I’ve used their products in classes, but I can also recommend them for their excellent educational blog.
If you intend to use lime plasters, please go read all Jon’s posts and watch all their videos.
It’s completely free and will help you learn what you need to know.

I’ll be honest, lime plaster is still something I’m trying to get a handle on. I find it fussy to work with and it requires a high level of attention to detail and timing.

I’m sort of an airhead and details often elude me, so I gravitate toward clay plasters which, while still requiring skill, are a bit more forgiving.

For our structures, we’ve decided to use clay plasters on the inside of our natural buildings and lime plasters on the outside. At least to start our adventures; we may change our minds over time with more experience.

The one exception to keeping things simple is my enduring love for tadelakt, which is a lime plaster prepared and combined with olive oil soap that – I promise I’m not making this up – waterproofs the material. Takelakt is making stone out of lime and soap. Yup.

Here’s a picture of my first practice tadelakt ball – isn’t it lovely? Below it are some other practice balls from other students like me.

So, I’m planning for everyone one of my indoor showers to sport tadelakt walls. After I’m done practicing on fairy and dog houses, of course.

Can I Produce My Own Lime?

You might be wondering if you can dig your own lime and the answer is yes and no. If you’re blessed to have inherited a lime pit on your property, then you can probably experiment long enough and read up enough to learn to use it successfully.

Because prepared lime will stay usable indefinately if kept wet, plasterers throughout the centuries would dig lime pits for their sons and their grandsons. New pits would be dug for each succeeding generation, with sons learning at their fathers side the subtle and beautiful art of lime plaster.

What we’re suffering from today is a generation gap – so few people still have working knowledge of these dying arts! There are artisans and builders committed to rediscovering and applying these skills, but it’s a renaissance in progress.

So, the answer is the question is that, if you have a lime pit or are gifted in chemistry, you could probably find local lime and experiment with it long enough to come up with your own recipes for plaster.

If that doesn’t describe you, the most logical choice is to purchase quality lime products from a source you trust, who can prove to you they understand the chemistry and artistry of their craft.

A Few Books

The number of natural building books is increasing, thank the Lord! When we first started researching a decade ago, there weren’t as many resources on this topic as there are today. These are only a few of the books that I’ve added to my library in recent years or are on my list to purchase.

The New Strawbale Home, by Catherine Wanek (there are two editions)
Using Natural Finishes: Lime and Clay Based Plasters, Renders and Paints – A Step-by-step Guide, by Adam Weismann and Katy Bryc (there are two editions)
The Cob Builders Handbook: You Can Hand-Sculpt Your Own Home, by Becky Bee
Build Your Own Earth Oven: A Low-Cost Wood-Fired Mud Oven, Simple Sourdough Bread, Perfect Loaves, by Kiko Denzer (get the newest edition)
Tadelakt, by Michael Johannes Ochs (not a how-to but inspirational and factual)
Building Natural Ponds: Create a Clean, Algae-free Pond without Pumps, Filters, or Chemicals, by Robert Pavlis

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