Building real structures
Phase 2 construction means real structures. The single best move here isn't a video or a book, it's a weekend natural building workshop. By every account I've read and heard, one afternoon of mixing cob with your feet changes your relationship to building materials in a way no video can. Timber framing, earthen plasters, and rubble trench foundations are all learnable with good guidance and a willingness to get dirty.
Start here
This Cob House — What a hands-on cob workshop actually looks like, useful for knowing what you're signing up for before you book one.
Simon Dunn — Layout, cutting, and fitting the joint that timber construction is built on, demonstrated by hand.
Square rule layout and hand-cut joinery on a tie beam, hand tools only. A good second sitting once the basic joint makes sense.
First project
Attend a natural building workshop
Find a hands-on cob, adobe, or rammed earth workshop, typically a weekend or week-long format; they run regularly across North America and Europe. Then come home and build something small in the same material: a garden bench, an outdoor oven, a wall section. The workshop gives you the feel for the material. The follow-up project proves you actually have it.
Other ways in
Cob garden bench or outdoor pizza oven
A small freestanding cob object that gets full weather exposure year-round. A bench or pizza oven is the right scale here: enough mass to calibrate your mix proportions for your local subsoil, enough exterior surface to validate lime-plaster topcoats and drainage details, and a single full weather cycle to confirm both. The numbers and finishes you settle on become the spec sheet for the larger cob work that follows.
Hand-cut timber-frame sawhorses
Build a pair of timber-frame sawhorses using mortise-and-tenon joinery, by hand with chisel and mallet. The joints teach layout (reference faces, square rule vs. scribe rule), accurate paring, and how to fit a joint that does not rack under load. The sawhorses become shop infrastructure you use on every later build, and the joint itself is the same one that holds a timber-frame structure together. Direct skill transfer, finished tool at the end.
Phase 3 construction is leading a complete natural build, earthship, cob, or timber frame, and training others while you do it. See construction in phase 3 →
Go deeper
The Appropriate Technology Library
Hundreds of digitized how-to manuals on low-tech infrastructure: water, shelter, agriculture, energy. Searchable on archive.org alongside the related CD3WD collection.
Community Experiences
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