Mud house!

Has anyone built themselves a mud house before? I think it is different than cob. It is literally mud (maybe with a little straw) baked in the sun. It's the traditional way of building around here, and I had never seen one like these in the States before I left.

Check it out: Our house

There are also two stone rooms, on either end of the house. One stacked slate (no mortar) and the other is granite.

Earthen building techniques are all fairly closely related.

When you bake your units in the sun and then stack them into a wall, you call that adobe.

Unless you made the units stick together by compressing them, in which case they're CEBs, Compressed Earth Blocks.

When you pile your mud into a wall and let it dry in place, that's cob. (Occasionally, and only in the US Southwest I think, it's "coursed adobe" or "puddled adobe".)

But when you get your wall to hold together by compressing it, that's rammed earth.

I love them all.

Well, I feel sheepish. I grew up in Tucson in the land of adobe! Guess I had never seen one built from scratch before. It was such a cool process to be part of building this place.

The amazing thing is that we live in one of the wettest states of India and still the traditional building method is mud bricks (adobe bricks) which will melt in the rain! The key is to keep the rain off with a nice big slate roof. It even blocks the monsoon rain.

Thanks for the clarification!