Pizza Oven & Introduction to Natural Building 

Number of Students: up to 10

Cost: $450

The Project

Our three and half day introductory workshop will get you started on natural building. In addition to building a complete cob oven, we’ll give you the basics of all the steps involved with making a cabin or garden wall.

We’ll mix building the oven with doing other natural building techniques throughout the three and half days. This will include how a rubble trench works, basics of earth bags, cobbing and adobe brick making and infill techniques like cordwood cob, light straw clay (slip straw), and bale cob. We’ll demonstrate how to put in windows and doors and take time for plastering from base coats to finishes, carving, and art.

On Sunday night we’ll have a pizza party and learn how to fire the oven and build and cook pizzas. Your learning will be enhanced by all of the natural and alternative features at our urban homestead including four earthy cabins, a cob oven, cob walls and appropriate technologies in use from greenhouses to solar wall heaters solar showers. If you’re curious about natural and earthen building and want to test the waters before taking a longer course, this is the opportunity for you.

Each participant will receive Kyle’s book, “Build it with Earth: the Cob Pizza Oven” as well as Conrad’s book, “House of Earth” in the mail prior to the course.

About the Site

The Be the Change Project is a Reno-based nonprofit, centered on our half-acre urban homestead where we have offered classes, tours, and workshops since 2011. That year we were able to buy what was a run down and neglected house on a half-acre through fundraising and crowdfunding. Since then we have enjoyed living an alternative and off-the-grid lifestyle while transforming the property into a verdant oasis. It has become a center for neighborhood uplift as well as a model for simpler living in the urban/suburban context. We were a Mother Earth News Magazine Homestead of the Year in 2013.

Reno is in the high desert on the western edge of the Great Basin. The weather in May and June is usually warm, clear, and sunny during the days with much cooler nights. It can get hot, and rain is unlikely.

Along with earthen cabins, landscape walls, ovens, and plasters on site, we’ve developed and use many systems for living more sustainably in town which you’ll get to know and use during the workshop:

• Solar cooking and wall heaters

• Small scale solar PV

• Wood stove and solar thermosiphon water heating

• Composting - vermicomposting and conventional aerobic piles

• Alternative septic system - the Watson Wick

• Basic principles and practices of Permaculture

• Organic small plot intensive gardening including season extenders like hoop houses, root cellaring and solar dehydrating

• ScAvenging! - upcycling and salvaging materials from the urban waste stream

• Living with little electricity and fossil fuels

• Wood-fired hot tub

Lodging

We have a variety of lodging options including cob cabins, rooms, tent sites, and parking for camper vans.

Registration, Payment, & Refunds

This workshop requires a $100 deposit to hold your space. When a deposit is made, Kyle will reach out to you, welcome you to the course, and get you in the email loop with all the details.

Go here to make a Venmo deposit or send a check for $100 made out to “Cobitat” and mailed to 2055 McCloud Avenue, Reno, NV 89512. Full payments are also gladly accepted.

Deposit is refundable (minus $20 for books and mailing cost if it’s already been shipped to you) until six weeks before the start of the class. If you cancel with less than six weeks before the start of the class and your spot can be filled, we will issue a refund minus book costs. If it can’t be filled, your deposit will not be refunded.

Full payment is requested by two weeks before the start of each class.