“But wouldn’t your energy be better used going on a march to protest about world hunger.”

This was the reply to my girlfriend when her boss was trying to understand our ‘green’ attitude to life.

In fact to describe it as ‘green’ means nothing to us, our lifestyle is just our lifestyle within which we follow some core beliefs, those beliefs happen to be easily boxed and packaged as ‘green’ which is a shame as it somehow separates us from others who feel no desire to be ‘green’ and yet may share the same core beliefs.

So to anyone who may be looking at the way we are building here and the way we get our energy and are asking themselves why, I would like to explain why we do what we do without mentioning that word ‘green’ again (in this post!).

On the south side of home we have built the bathroom/toilet extension out of Cob. Cob is nothing more than clay, or in our case clay rich soil, sand and straw. The walls are half a meter thick which made it a year’s work so why do it that way?

A brick, or cement block building of that size would have taken a quarter of the time to build and far more acceptable and modern, why bother to use Cob?

So when you have a bath or a shower, especially in the winter, does your bathroom steam up? Are your walls wet with condensation, do you need to ventilate well to stop mould, would it feel cold in there if you had no heating?

Our Cob bathroom with a lime washed clay plaster, has no heating, the clay in the plaster and the walls regulates the moisture, absorbing it during bath time and slowly releasing in a natural drying process, though the room steams up there is never any wetness on the walls. The thick walls absorb the heat during the summer months and slowly release it during the winter, in the summer the room is cool, in the winter it is warm.

Of course one could achieve the same results with modern building techniques but at what cost?

The cost of building the cob walls of our bathroom was around 150 Euros ! Which is probably around a tenth of the cost of building with bricks.

All I actually did was to rearrange the dirt on the ground! I added sand straw and water and reshaped that dirt into a bathroom that is designed to work within the problems a bathroom can create.

On the North side of our house I am building the post and beam straw bale extension well documented here on the blog, but why straw bale?

The North side of our house gets the cold winds in the winter and little sun, we needed to build something that was well insulated. Straw bales have an insulation value of hmmmm well I would like to be able to tell you but apparently it is quite disputed what R value a straw bale has but suffice to say that straw bale walls are the equivalent of having a great deal of insulation in the walls!!

Placed off the ground on a stem wall and with a good roof straw bale houses over 100 years old are still sound and standing, showing no signs of deterioration.

The cost? Well we have used about 60 straw bales at 3 Euros each so at 180 Euros the walls have cost about a third of just what the insulation would have cost us to put inside the walls had we built using bricks!

So there we have it, cost and comfort, these are our priorities, our home will never be featured in Home and Gardens but it is hand made, fun to live in, warm, dry, cheap to run and not owned by a mortgage company. And one day next year when it is all finished I look forward to starting work on the land to try and produce our own food.