One great reason for working with cob is it's ideal for creating niches and unusual shapes. Here's our bedroom wall - and the artist in her studio!
You can build in shelves out of spare pieces of wood, without needing any nails; or you can just knock holes out of the wall to create extra variety.
Here's our own little church/temple effect downstairs!
What we've really enjoyed about getting up on the roof and completing it has been the view. Now we have very kindly been donated a Velux roof window, by Andrew Renirie of Cape Loft Windows, part of Savati. It is a great example of passive solar light/heat as it captures the sun overhead most of the day; and it's openable so we can get through to the roof. 
We have also included an unusual central 'quiet space' in the house (known in Indian architectural theory as a 'Brahmasthan') which is open both to the ground (no foundation) and the sky. Waterproofing this area was quite a complex problem but Andrew and Savati have come to our aid again by creating and donating a kind of metal 'chimney' which should really help matters.
The floor has had a concrete slab, as we're in Muizenberg by the sea and vlei and the water table level is an issue! However, we've put in a lovely warm earth floor on top of it. It's got horse dung in it in place of straw, as a binder. The dung has to be well soaked and separated or you get black patches of dung showing up in the floor (we had to fix a couple of areas); but otherwise it's similar to mixing cob (and really not smelly!)
If you lay the whole lot at once it'll crack as it dries, but if you do it in layers you need to ensure the top is roughened so that the next layer will bond nicely to it.
The next layer was much smoother but you need to stay off it for a few weeks. We humans managed to do so, but not everyone did...
This has then been fixed up and a thin top layer put in certain places, with the traditional 'feta lid' burnishing happening once things were fully dry. At time of writing downstairs has not been sealed yet - an Envirotouch rock sealant is going to be used for this. You can see something of the final burnishing through the pentagon hole here: this has just been closed up with a specially cut piece of plywood! The top floor has been sanded and then sealed with Envirotouch wood sealant for floors.
We're a bit reliant on others for photos at the moment owing to a mishap with our camera. All these photos have been offered for our personal use on the blog but not necessarily for you to re-use. Thanks to Mark Wessels for this family shot, which shows the house with bitumen gum unceremoniously draped over the roof. Our cobbing team learned to sew the waterproofing together (with the aid of a blowtorch!) Of course the cob insulation is totally fireproof, which came in handy with a south-easter pumping all week we were putting it on. Doing it ourselves saved a bunch of rands and gave our guys experience with a new skill - on a very complicated roof.
This one's thanks to Esa Alexander of The Timeswhich did an article earlier this year.
Here's a view from the roof, when we were covering the leichtlehm with a simple clay/sand mix for smoothness. It looked beautiful until we added the bitumen-gum waterproofing on top! (Thanks to Ian Evans from the UK Independent). 
Here's another shot (thanks to Linda!) of the side before the front door went in. There's supposed to be a wood panel above around a built-in cupboard: all our hold-ups at this stage are around carpentry, and although the cobbing and plastering took over a year in total (including inside plastering), it would have been no quicker any other way given the amount of specialist wood in this house. YOUR cob house could involve a lot less wood to speed things up and cheapen them; although the wood is, of course, very beautiful!
In most houses you get a series circuit of electricity conduits around you as you stand or sit in a room, meaning you are constantly contained within an electromagnetic field - not the healthiest way to live. Our cob floor is yet to go in, so our maze of conduits is mostly going below our feet, and where not it's going straight up and down the walls between floors, avoiding much of the electromagnetic field effect.
At last - the engineering feat of the girder is safely positioned above the garage entrance so we can cob the final upstairs wall (or rather, mostly, adobe brick it). 
First insulating layer is cardboard, this is used pretty widely for insulation but we're using flat boxes as it's also to cover gaps in the timber so that no clay dust comes through from the next layer.
Next layer is called "leichtlehm" - presumably a German invention, it means 'light-clay'. Made with as much straw as can soak up a sand/clay mix and water. You could do this barefoot (I did!) but it's quite prickly.
Then comes the complicated bit - getting it up two stories in a convoy of buckets and pulleys...
Finally it gets put in place, about 10cm thick in the end after much stamping down. As with the cardboard, we're just covering the area over the internal part of the house.
In some places we're using "adobes" - cob bricks. They can go quite high quite quickly and provide a strong thin wall in places where we don't want the thickness. Here is one near the front door.
There are more adobes here above the kitchen doorway, a doorway that had to be cobbed on one side but attached to the plumbing brickwork on the other side. Thick cob walls above would have been too much for the lintel.
Here's a view from the living room through one of the big north panels.
Another doorway upstairs and some scaffolding in process at the internal entrance to the guest bedroom.
As upstairs gets completed we can see where the east light will come in to our bedroom...
...and the 'brahmastan', a central still-point that's left empty from foundation to sky (a sky-light will be added later, and probably some hanging plants)
...there's another mountain that's only visible from the guest bedroom
and in this area are windows that will give a sea view and a view of the Hottentot Holland mountains in the distance respectively, here seen with built-in shelves that have been simply cobbed onto.
