Lynn Luan

Thank you all for your reply! I did not receive any notification sent to my email and thought there wasn't any responses until this weekend!

The exterior house wrap should be Tyvek but it was a diff and cheaper brand used by our contractor.

Here attached is the recent update!
We've finished the walls with some clay straw and modern insulation.
We started from doing the clay straw and then used chicken wire to hold them (our walls are 2*4, very narrow, and we experienced some clayed straw falling off due to gravity, so we used chicken wires... and it worked well).
Our zone is 5a in Illinois, it is very humid in the spring and early summer. We realized that the clay straws were not drying quickly, and we might also have insulation problems, so we switched to modern insulation to the north walls and west walls.

The current problem is that even the clay straw is too wet still and we already saw some mold growing.
But our hope is that once our weather turns hotter (we only started to enter summer this week), the mold can go away. If not, we will have to switch back to fiberglass insulation.

And due to my impatience, we will be starting the flooring soon.
Current plan is to use vapor barrier (6mil) and insulation foam. We are not sure about whether or not to use strawbales for the bed yet.

Paul Fookes wrote:Welcome to Permies Lynn.  Cob is a very good patching/ insulation material.  Our house is totally compressed earth bricks with cob infill between the bricks and the studs.  The main thing is to make sure that the external surfaces are protected from rain.  I suggest linseed oil as one type of water proofing.   We are looking forward to seeing your progress pictures.

Thank you so much for your reply. So new to this forum, I do not even know how to reply to comments...forgive me if I did this wrong.

Our garage already has vapor barrier and siding from the outside, so I guess my question is if I just do cob as insulation and lime wash +  linseed oil from the inside, will the wall unable to breathe and keep moisture within the cob over time?

Because most cob houses have the cob walls exposed to outside and inside both so that the wall can transport air and moisture, but in our case, the exterior was kind of blocked....

Thank you again so m uch for your reply and inspiration!

We hope to convert our garage into a studio and have found the cob method. But we have faced a few issues/questions:

(1) Our current garage has existing exterior walls (siding, vapor barrier, and wood studs), with a few tiny holes where air could sneak in, is it okay that we use cob as the insulation together with lime washes from the inside?

(2) We also hope to have a platform bed inside. We were originally thinking of just use strawbales and then patching the outside with cobs, but after watching some videos online, we are worries that the moisture inside could get into the strawbales and let insects grow. So we are not sure if we should stick to our original plan or to build structures inside completely using cobs. Any recommendations?

(for reference, we were thinking some inside structures like this home:    )

(3) we also have a pre-existing concrete floor and we are thinking maybe we should just use a vapor barrier to build other stuff upon (sand and then cob floor). We are in Illinois and weather can be cold and damp. So please correct us if this is not okay.

Thank you all!

I will try to post pictures along the way.