Plans, blueprints, material lists, and the sources behind them

Building library

Wood construction, cob, and wood/cob hybrid, with the primary sources, and honest notes on what each method will and will not do.

This is a working library, not a catalogue of inspiration. Everything here is either a plan you can build from, a primary source you can check, or a plain statement of what a method costs and where it fails.

Three things shape how it is organised:

Cob is now in the building code. That changes the first question from “is this legal?” to “has my county adopted it?” That is a phone call, not a fight. What Appendix U means →

The honest recommendation is hybrid. A timber frame carries the structure and gets the roof up; earth fills between the posts. The people with the most cob experience moved to this, and they published why. The reasoning →

Government plans are the best free plans that exist. Extension services have published engineered farm building plans for a century, and almost nobody outside farming knows. The plan library →

Where the gaps still are

Being straight about what this library does not yet answer is part of its value. These are the places where the free literature is thin, and where documented work by people here would be a real contribution.

• Cold-climate cob performance. The weakest area in the free literature and the most common cause of failure.
• Real cost sheets. Almost every natural-building site avoids hard numbers. Honest receipts would make this library genuinely unlike any other.
• Which counties have adopted Appendix U. No public tracker exists.
• Sawmill-to-frame workflow. Milling your own from a woodlot is poorly covered anywhere free.
• Root cellars, springhouses, and cold storage. Heavily wanted by homesteaders, thin online.

• Start here

  Four questions that narrow the choice before you spend anything.

• Code and permits

  Cob entered the International Residential Code in 2021. What that actually means, and the call to make to your building department.

• Building in wood

  The authoritative free reference on wood as a structural material, and the sequence worth building in.

• Cob and earthen walls

  What cob is, how to test your own soil, and where earthen walls fail. Includes the USDA's 1926 rammed earth bulletin, a related system, not the same one.

• Timber frame with earth infill

  A timber frame carries the structure and gets the roof up first; earth fills between the posts. Why the most experienced cob builders moved to this.

• The plan library

  664 engineered building plans from the agricultural extension services, free, and almost unknown outside farming.

• Materials, cut lists, and costing

  Where to find plans that come with materials lists, and why honest cost sheets are the thing this library most needs.

• The hosted library

  Seven US government documents mirrored on this server, because links rot and a library should not depend on someone else's hosting.

• Members' builds

  Documented builds from people here, photos, receipts, mistakes, and the actual final cost.