Building A House With Pallets OFF-GRID!

Hi, I'm Autumn Flower. My pronouns are she, her. I'm the founder of Mudworks and today we'll be taking a tour of the honeycomb home as well as a cob pizza oven. We are on site right now at Urban Timber. This is a local San Diego organization that saves wood that would otherwise often be going to the landfill and creates beautiful products. And right now we're going to take a look at this cob oven and wood-fired stove top that I helped to create in a series of workshops to support the emerging community here. There's so many reasons that I love cob. It's accessible. It's something that old people, young people, anyone of a variety of different levels of abilities can get their hands in the mud and help to create something really beautiful. It's affordable. You can oftentimes use soil straight from the ground where you're building to create. Cob is also really sustainable. By using materials straight from the earth, we can create things that one day will return right back to the earth. Cob is a building material that utilizes clay, sand, and straw to make a variety of different uses and functions. And what you can see here is created out of that mixture. We were actually able to use local soil just from right behind the project site here, mixed it with a little bit of extra sand that we were able to acquire locally, and some straw into that mixture for the fiber to build this cooking complex. Each of these materials in the cob mixture serves its own purpose. The clay works as the binding agent. It's got those sticky properties that hold everything together. The sand is the aggregate that provides that compressive strength that makes it really strong, kind of like bricks in a brick and mortar structure. Our third material in the mix, the straw, provides the tensile strength. So that's all of these interlocking fibers that come together and create a mix that's hard to pull apart. Cob is both fireproof and moldproof, and one of the best parts is it opens up the room for artistic creativity. You can see the sculptural elements that we've added on here, and you can really create any shape you can imagine with cob. If you're interested in natural building, but you're not ready to take the step into building a structure, something like a rocket grill or a pizza oven is a really great place to start. It's accessible. It's something you can do with friends, maybe over the course of a few days, and it's a great way to build some skills that can lead you to creating more in the future. Next, let's head to the honeycomb home where you can see these same materials being implemented in a larger project. Right now we're on site at a beautiful homestead, and this is the honeycomb home. It's a six-sided 120 square foot structure that I designed in the shape of a hexagon, and it's built using natural materials. This dwelling was created using a variety of different natural building methods. The walls are built with reclaimed wooden shipping pallets. Those pallets are then filled with straw, which works as a natural insulation, and then covered in a few layers of earth plaster. This structure also has a living roof, so there's a few inches of soil that cover the top of the roof that provides a place for native grasses and other plants to grow, and it also is very insulating, keeping the home warm in the winter and cool in the summer. All of the windows that you see on this structure were reclaimed, as were many of the materials that were used to build this dwelling. The door, I created myself using lumber and constructed it into this barn door style aesthetic, and the handle is actually a piece of manzanita wood that I was able to salvage from a fallen tree. One of the other unique features of this project is this reclaimed glass door that we turned sideways and are now using as a window, and it's on a pulley system. This allows for easy opening and closing and provides a lot of cross-breeze to keep it cool in the hot summer days. The pallet cob method is absolutely my favorite style of natural building. Not only is it a great way to utilize materials that might otherwise go to the landfill, it also incorporates both insulation and thermal mass to create an efficient dwelling that is much easier to build. Here we are inside the honeycomb home. One of the first things you'll notice upon entering the space is these window niches and bookshelves that are sculpted out of cob. Not only does this provide an opportunity for artistic embellishment, but it also opens up a lot of functionality inside the space. When the honeycomb home was first built, it was used as an artistic and creative space for someone that lived on this land, and now it's being utilized as a home office. These walls are built using the very same cob mixture, but on the interior of this dwelling we decided to finish it with this white earthen paint. This is a clay-based paint that we made ourselves, mixed up, and put on the walls to just really brighten the space and help it feel a bit larger inside. People are often surprised to hear that this space is only 120 square feet on the interior. The wide corners and this hexagonal shaped structure allow the space to feel much larger than a structure would of 120 square feet in a square or a rectangle. If you're seeking to build without needing a permit, oftentimes you'll be limited to 120 square feet depending on where you live, so building in a hexagon is a great way to maximize the interior felt space of your dwelling. What you see here is called a truth window. This is a common tradition in a lot of natural buildings that allows you to see directly into the wall system. One of my other favorite aspects of this design is the roof rafter support braces that we spiraled up to lead the eye to our central piece, which is a hexagonal skylight. Both the spiral and the hexagon are sacred shapes that are found all throughout nature and were a very important part of the design and creation of this dwelling. Lastly, beneath our feet is an earthen floor. This is created using the very same materials of clay, sand, and straw, and sealed with linseed oil to stabilize the floor and create a long-lasting and durable finish. Earthen floors have a lot of benefits. They're both warmer and softer than conventional methods such as cement slabs, and walking on an earthen floor with bare feet can be a very grounding experience. I'm deeply passionate about natural building as a way of integrating ancestral wisdom with modern innovation. Building with the earth is accessible to folks of all ages. Utilizing these materials straight from the ground is a way to create dwellings that are both sustainable and cost-effective. Utilizing the inherent values and benefits of these materials creates structures that are incredibly energy efficient, and lastly, it opens up an infinite well of creative and artistic possibility. If you're interested in learning more and having some hands-on experience, there's a lot of ways to get involved. Mudworks hosts lots of natural building workshops and educational opportunities, and is also looking to collaborate with other folks that share this passion. You can learn more on Instagram at mudworks.earth or on the website at www.mud.works. Again, my name is Autumn Flower. Thank you so much for joining me on this tour of these projects, and I look forward to playing in the mud with you in the future.