House Alive!

Eight Week Natural Building Apprenticeship

**ONE SPACE LEFT**

Date: July 5 – August 29, 2010

Instructor: Coenraad Rogmans

Cost: $2,950

2009 Apprenticeship Project

Program Overview:

House Alive! is again offering an opportunity for people to get beyond the basics and experience an extended Natural Building apprenticeship. This immensely popular 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.  Learning how to build a natural home is one of the best investments you can make: once you know how to design, build and shape your own living space, you can save many thousands of dollars in living costs.

In many ways learning to build is like learning to play a musical instrument: It is hard to learn without another experienced person guiding you and, the more you do it the better you get. The apprenticeship program for 2010 offers 8 weeks of  “hands-on” building, problem solving, designing and discussing all aspects of natural building, allowing you to take the time to develop new skills under the guidance of experienced natural builders.

This year’s apprenticeship takes place on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. The reservation is incredibly beautiful, historically rich as well as tragic and is known as one of the poorest places in North America.  The project will be to build start-to-finish a cottage for a Native family. After completing the site preparations for the building, apprentices will participate in an 8 day “complete Shelter” workshop along with other students.

After the workshop we will prepare the cottage for the roof, build and attach the roof, and prep for finish plaster. In addition we’ll study and learn to build various “appropriate technologies,” and take tours of other natural building sites in the area.

In the final weeks we’ll also add ornamental details, windows and doors, and finish it off with earthen and lime plasters. Once completed we will have provided an inexpensive, non-toxic and low maintenance house to a place that really needs housing: 80% of the Lakota Indians are homeless or have no adequate housing.

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. Usually this will include a brief lecture or demonstration. 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.

6:00 pm- Dinner time. We’ll gather together for a delicious meal and reflect on the day.

The schedule during the 8 day workshops will be different, typically with an earlier start, a longer break in the middle of the day, and a slide show or lecture extending into the evening.  Some days will include field trips in the morning or afternoon. Days off will be provided but not at regular intervals, due to the nature of the programs’ schedule.

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 do all the foundation preparations for a “Rubble-trench” foundation. Utilities (water and electric) will be incorporated into the site plan. We’ll also prepare and tamp the sub-floor.

Week 2 and 3: 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 different ways to mix and apply cob, practice some simple wood framing, and begin installing windows and doors. Straw bales will be incorporated into the wall in certain sections. and experiment with light straw-clay.

Week 4: Roofs and carpentry

We’ll make trusses and assemble the roof in place..

Week 4, 5, and 6: We’ll experiment with a variety of wall systems, including light-straw clay, adobe, straw bale, wattle and daub, earthbag, and cordwood/cob.  In addition we’ll learn about solar electric systems, wood-heating systems, composting toilets, rain water collection, and more

Week 7 and 8: “Buttoning Up”

We’ll install windows and doors, and work on the finish plaster and finish floor.

The Site

The Pine Ridge Reservation is home of the Lakota Nation, who have lived there for many thousands of years, mostly in tipis and with the buffalo as their main source of food. With the coming of the Europeans, their life of balance with nature was destroyed. The reservation has become a place of severe poverty, with rampant homelessness, disease, unemployment and alcoholism. The Lakota people are very kind, love to laugh and are in many ways still deeply connected to their roots and history: It wasn’t so long ago that Crazy Horse, one of their great chiefs, fought the American army at Wounded Knee. Located right next to Badlands National Park, the land feels ancient with it’s spectacular vistas and enormous wind sculpted “sand mountains”.

The house we will be building there is a gift to the Lakota people and to one elder in particular. He presently lives in a government housing project in ill repair on the reservation. Though he owns a plot of land, he has no money or skills to build a house.  We will be building his house, as well as teaching others in the community skills to build more like it, over the course of the apprenticeship, 1 workshop, and 1 “volunteer” period.

Lodging and facilities

The site will have ample space for camping; you will need to bring a tent and other gear to make yourself comfortable living and working outside for 8 weeks.  We’ll take our meals outside, under a simple shade structure. There will be an outdoor kitchen, hot shower, and a composting toilet.  There is no laundry machine on-site, but there are laundromats nearby and hand-washing of clothes will be possible.

Food

Your tuition includes all your food during work days (it is not provided for days off).  You will be expected to take part in preparation and clean-up of meals.  All food will be vegetarian.  During days off you will have access to a kitchen but will be expected to provide your own ingredients from the grocery store.

Other information

To stay true to the spirit of an apprenticeship, we will limit the size of the program to 8 participants to ensure the everyone can fully accomplish their individual learning needs.  We aim to have a reasonable balance of males and females.

How to apply:

Considering the length and intensity of this program we would like to know more about you and make sure that you understand the nature of the program before we would accept your deposit.  There are no prerequisites to participation, but we ask you to answer the following questions to make sure that what we have to offer fits your needs. We will likely want to follow up on your answers to the following questions with an in-person phone call.

1) General information: What is your age, sex (if not obvious by your name), phone number, how do you occupy your time (work, school, etc.), and where do you live?
2) What experience do you have with physical labor?
4) What experience do you have in construction?
5) Why do you want to participate in a long natural building program?
6) Describe your experience living and/or working in a small community.

This program will be administered and taught by Coenraad Rogmans. Please e-mail your answers to coenraad@housealive.org. Or if you prefer regular mail, you can send them to:

Coenraad Rogmans
7540 Griffin Lane
Jacksonville, OR 97530

Participants will be accepted to the program on a rolling basis. Applications will continue to be accepted until the program fills. Please contact Coenraad with any questions you have.

Below you will find an article written by one of our apprentices from 3 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.