Glenn Herbert

There was once a beaver dam on a wide flat part of the creek upstream of our property for maybe a few years, and a beaver lived in our pond formed by a concrete-faced dam for a year or two, but the creekbed's grade is too steep at least in its lower half for any beaver dam to survive a common flood, when the water can rise 3 or 4 feet in a few hours.

I have no real information on the pipeline except that there was an easement in the deed from late 19th-early 20th century. It was abandoned long before my parents bought the land in the mid 50's, though they didn't bother to remove the pipes crossing the creek.

The highway was Interstate 88 which runs between Binghamton and Albany in New York State, and you can probably look up information about it.

John, my creek has a seven mile long watershed upstream. It used to have a stable bed... established tuft grass in wide parts of the bed,  flat stones a century old shingling the spot where a gas pipeline used to run across the creek. Then in 1972, an interstate highway was built across the headwaters with fast drainage into the streambed and remnants of Hurricane Agnes caused major flooding in the region and uprooted all established natural stable features. The features never returned, and floods now erode every year. The remnant pipes dangle 4-6 feet in the air, and the bed is eroded down to bedrock in that spot. It will probably be a century or two before the bed stabilizes again starting from that bedrock area just upstream of my land.

I doubt that a cob house without steel is more dangerous near a lightning strike than if a person was standing in a field in that spot without a house. The interior would probably be dry and less conductive than a wet field. A steel reinforced house might be safer than an open field.

That looks like a good functional layout. One thing that I have questions about is the raised floor. That plus the internal bench height plus thickness of the bench top make the bench a bit high for comfortable sitting (unless you have tall people ). You could keep the floor one brick thick and lower the bench and exhaust by one brick to have the same ISA. For that matter, since the rule of thumb is that walls below the exhaust height do not count as ISA due to hot gases not going lower than that, you could lower the floor while keeping everything else the same if the bench is at the height you really want. That might allow a bit more freedom of flow in the bench which might help heat distribution. You would have to ask Peter if that would actually work - I don't have experimental evidence there.

A cornice is a thickened top edge of a wall extending outward. It can be quite ornate with fancy brickwork or (in wood) fancy millwork. Cornices were pretty universal in Victorian times but have died out in the past century.

Eight years later, do you still have that exercise bike? Did you ever resolve the slippage?

My thought for this kind of situation would be to put superglue (ACC, alpha cyanoacrylate), the liquid variety, not gel, in the gap. It will seep into tight spaces and is very strong.

I think cob (even well reinforced with straw) less than 3" thick between two much thicker masses will be a serious stress concentration and will tend to crack. Putting pavers over that thin spot will conceal the crack and prevent damage from jagged crack edges crumbling.

One question that might help suggest an answer is, is there a slope from side to side in the area you want to build these rooms? If you make the first one, then the next and the next a step up or down, you could make the roofs nest over or under their neighbors, and potentially allow a pocket in the first wall for the beam of the next to slide into.

A wood stove has a much higher exhaust temperature and thus much more draw due to the chimney than a RMH will. You want the chimney to be as smooth as possible to minimize drag. I can't say if the corrugated pipe will or won't work here, but I would be cautious.