Six Week Natural Building Apprenticeship

June 15 - July 26, 2008

Cost: $2,000

For the fourth year, House Alive offers our popular 6 week natural building apprenticeship. This hands-on, intensive course is designed for people who want to use natural building skills in a professional context or who want to take extra time to work on skill development for their personal project. Participants will get first-hand experience with every aspect of building a natural home, from the foundation to the roof.

This program will be almost exclusively “hands-on” learning. The best way to learn how to build is simply to build, and the more you do it the more you learn. Participants will be able to take the time to develop and practice new skills under the guidance of experienced natural builders. On occasion guest builders will visit the site to teach specific techniques.

Throughout the course we’ll be working on the different elements of building a 200 sq. ft. cob cabin from the ground up. Demonstrations and instruction will be given as needed to explain building techniques and design choices. Participants should expect full and exciting days.

Daily Schedule - A look at an average day:

7:30 am- Breakfast

8 am- An early start helps to beat the heat. We’ll meet on the work site and have a brief meeting to determine the plan for the day. After the meeting we’ll split up and tackle the tasks for the day.

12 pm- Break for lunch.

1 pm- back to the work site to continue where we left off from the morning.

4:45 pm- Time to clean up. A clean job site is a safe job site.

5 pm- Done for the day! Time to go for a swim, take a shower and get ready for dinner.

6:30 pm- Dinner time. We’ll gather together for a delicious meal and reflect on the day.

We’ll work 5 full days a week. On the 6th day we’ll work half a day at the work site, followed by a field trip to visit nearby natural buildings and talk about other building topics.

There will be one full day off per week. In the middle of the program, there will be a 3-day weekend (4th of July weekend).

Curriculum - What you can expect to learn and when. The details will vary depending on time, design, on group interest.

Week 1: Foundation and site preparation

We will build a rubble trench foundation, with an earthbag stem wall. Utilities (water and electric) will be incorporated into the site plan. We’ll also prepare and tamp down the sub-floor.

Week 2: Wall systems

We’ll start the days mixing cob by foot and putting it on our new foundation. We’ll discuss the finding and preparation of materials, learn to make adobe bricks, practice some simple wood framing, and experiment with light straw-clay.

Week 3: Walls, continued

We’ll continue cob building, and practice using mechanical mixing techniques (a.k.a. “tractor cob”). Electricity, windows, niches and other features will be incorporated into the walls.

Week 4: Roof building. We’ll harvest wood poles from the forest, learn to peel them by hand, and use them to build a “living” roof.

Week 5: Plastering, rough and “finish”

Plastering is a very important skill that is easy to learn, but takes a lifetime to master. We’ll practice on a variety of surfaces with several plaster mixes.

Week 6: Floors and finish work

This is the time for finishing touches: Installing and trimming windows, adding mosaics, bas reliefs, and other creative features. We’ll finish off by pouring a beautiful earthen floor.

The Site

The program this year will be hosted by Full Bloom Farm. Established in 2005, Full Bloom Farm is in the early stages of developing an intentional community and large organic farm in a beautiful, secluded valley in Southern Oregon. The farm has 280 acres of meadow and forest, 2 creeks and a swimming pond. Right now there are 9 year-round residents (6 adults and 3 children); our project will be to build a house for Joe, Rosie and their daughter Ocean (they’re currently living in a 40 ft school bus). Joe and Rosie are very excited about building a cob house, and will be helping us as much as they can during the project.

Lodging and facilities

Full Bloom Farm is in a fairly remote location; it’s a 20 minute drive to the nearest grocery store. But thanks to the gardens and chickens, we’ll have lots of fresh food on hand. Participants will be camping during the course, and will need to bring a tent, sleeping bag, pad, and anything else they need to make themselves comfortable. We’ll take our meals outside, under a simple shade structure. There will be an outdoor kitchen, shower, and a composting toilet. A washing machine for clothes is available on site.

Food

The price of the program includes food for all the days that we are working. Breakfasts will be self serve, lunches will consist of an assortment of sandwich fixings and salads. Dinners will be prepared by participants on a rotating basis. Everyone will be expected to help prepare and clean up after meals. During days off, there will be no food provided, but participants are welcome to use the kitchen to prepare their own food, and will have access to the garden. They should expect to augment food during days off with groceries from town.

Other information

Participants will also be asked to help keep the farm humming through some light gardening tasks, watering, forestry, care for animals, etc. Although this is not an official part of the curriculum, most people have found this an enjoyable way to connect to the land around them.

To stay true to the spirit of an apprenticeship, we will only be accepting 6 participants to ensure the everyone can fully accomplish their individual learning needs.

To apply for this program, please send answers to the following questions by e-mail or regular mail. There are no prerequisites to participation, but we ask people to answer these questions to make sure that what we have to offer fits their needs. We feel that all of us, instructors and students, make a big commitment in time and money during these long programs and we want to make sure that it is a good match for all.

1) General information: What is your age, sex, how do you occupy your time (work, school, etc.), and where do you live?
2) What are your interests, skills and/or hobbies?
3) What experience do you have in hard physical labor?
4) What experience do you have in construction?
5) Why do you want to participate in a long natural building program?
6) Why are you attracted to the program that House Alive offers?
7) What experience do you have living and/or working in a small community? What did you like about that situation? What was challenging?

This program will be administered and taught by James Thomson.  Please e-mail your answers to This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it .

Or if you prefer regular mail, you can send them to:

James Thomson
7540 Griffin Lane
Jacksonville, OR 97530

Participants will be accepted to the program starting February 1.  Applications will continue to be accepted until the program fills. Please contact James with any questions you have.

Below you will find an article written by one of our apprentices from 2 years ago. Keep in mind that the details of this year’s program will vary somewhat from the one described here, but the spirit of the program is the same. Upon request we can give you names and phone numbers of past participants who would be happy to talk about their experience with the program.

Natural Building, the way of the future

By Dan Crawford, as published in “The Rebublic of East Vancouver, " December 6th, 2006.

(Click here to read this article online)

The pressing question for anyone contemplating their fate in a post-heated, post-peak oil world is "How am I going to live?"

Answers to this question arrive at the realization that directly meeting everyday needs will be essential, instead of relying on our profoundly indirect and abstract support systems currently in place.

A person's home will be central to a solution that can meet those needs. A proper home can provide year-round protection from the elements, the roof can provide water through rainfall collection, the windows can provide heat and light energy from the sun, and the land can provide the necessary food and provide for the management of wastes.

In any “going-to-live” scenario, a design for adaptability is also key, to help address all of the unknowns arising from the problems to be presented by global warming and low-energy.

A person's home would ideally be an "adaptable home" with the following requisites: be made of readily available, non-toxic building materials; be built using simple and accessible construction methods; be well suited for a range of environments; and be easily maintained and modified.

The conventional construction methods employed today do not fit any of these requirements. But we need not look far to find ones that do because they have existed for thousands of years. Before the cement-and-rebar phase of today, people built using what was readily available: mud, wood and rock. Some of the structures made with these elements are still standing today: the great wall of China, pyramids of Egypt, and cob homes in England.

This past summer I decided to learn more about these methods, aptly termed "Natural Building," by participating in a six-week apprenticeship course offered in southern Oregon. The course gave hands-on experience with straw-bale, earth-bag, cob, earthen plasters, and light-straw infill building methods.

The group was comprised of six individuals from across the US along with one Israeli and myself—four males and two females aged twenty to thirty all coming together from widely different backgrounds but sharing very similar interests. The sole intent was to pursue the dream of one day building our own homes, with our own designs, using our own hands.

The passion for this was immediately conveyed through the limited contents of our backpacks. Mixed in with peoples tents, sleeping bags and clothes were books on building, draft paper reams, drawing pencils and hand-tools. We came to not only learn but to also experience and practice a self-sufficient lifestyle reflective of the building process itself.

The 20-acre property had no transmission lines or other municipal infrastructure. The electricity on site came from an array of solar panels, batteries and inverters. Water was pumped from an underground well up to a holding tank that gravity fed out to the various buildings. A garden helped to provide food and the composting toilets completed the cycle. Solar water heaters provided hot water for the showers. Our daily water and energy requirements were minimal in comparison to how most of us normally live, yet, our quality of life was relatively the same, if not better.

A typical day began at 7 AM when the morning sun would break over the eastern mountains striking down into our tents making sleep impossible. The group would congregate in the nearby cob cottage, our communal gathering spot, to fire up hot drinks and snack on light foods in preparation for a day outside.

We would then converge on the build site, just steps away, to meet the instructors who would outline the day's agenda. Afterwards, we would divide into smaller groups and tackle specific tasks with the instructors working alongside us to answer any specific questions, offer advice and guidance. We would normally switch up the tasks throughout the day with short, informal lectures placed in between to demonstrate the skills, convey the theory, and explain the terminology.

The main project was to construct a small, single-room school house for the children in the area. The design of the building incorporated a variety of natural building methods.

The foundation was composed of earth-bags, a technique where woven-style bags are filled with an aggregate mix of gravel, sand, and cement. The bags are piled on top of each other, much like a wall of bricks, and as the contents cure, the bags settle, forming a solid, inter-locked structure on top of which the rest of the building stands.

The next step was the construction of the straw-bale walls. The progress on the walls was quick at first as we stacked the bales, but then slowed during the tying phase. Tying the bales together ensured that the wall would behave as one giant bale' On top of this, a level-layer of cob was applied for the roof poles to rest on.

Cob is the name given to a mixture of clay, sand, straw and water. Entire homes can be built out of cob. The idea is to press down layer upon layer of cob so that when it dries you're left with a single monolithic structure. The straw is what gives cob much of its strength and ties, or weaves, the over-lapping layers together. We mixed the cob on top of large tarps by gingerly stomping on the straw-mud mixture with our bare-feet. This always made for enjoyable team-building experiences.

The roof poles came from trees on the property, felled by hand-saws, striped of their bark and carried back to the work site. Once hoisted into place they were fastened with lag bolts. These poles provided great stability to the overall structure of the building.

The roof itself was of a living design, the main layer being a water-impermeable pond liner with a layer of soil spread on top and different grasses planted in it. The transpiration of water moisture from the living roof during the summer season helps keep the roof (and building) cool, instead of warming up.

For the interior, the floor and walls were constructed of earthen plasters made up of clay, sand, and water with the addition of finely-chopped straw for the earthen floor. We used various trowels to spread the plasters level. Once thoroughly dried linseed oil was applied to the floor which added further protection. This work went at a quick pace because everyone could participate concurrently.

At day’s end, a rotating group of two would help with the preparation of dinner. We followed a strict vegetarian diet during the apprenticeship. No one seemed to mind the culinary change, and the variety of meals kept things interesting. A solar-oven and wood-fired cob oven were used occasionally to help with the food preparation.

The evenings allowed for many different activities—from personal time for reading and writing, to technical slide shows and discussions on building techniques, along with nightly ping-pong tournaments.

The experience itself covered many aspects of “natural building” but it also taught important life lessons on how to live and learn as a group while working towards a common goal. This was a very similar experience to one I had while on a Habitat for Humanity build in the Dominican Republic earlier this year, where it was the sum of everyone's strengths and weaknesses that mattered more than what any one individual was capable of doing.

In a world increasingly dependent on non-renewable, finite resources, this course provided knowledge and skills on using proven alternatives for a future that will be constrained in every sense of that word.