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By James Rush
A farmer has built a house for just £150 using an ancient building technique and materials he found in skips.
Michael Buck, 59, used only natural materials or unwanted items to build the ‘cob house’ at the bottom of his garden in the Oxfordshire countryside.
The former art teacher, now a rural smallholder near Oxford, has started renting out the property and his current tenant – a worker on a neighbouring dairy farm – pays for her lodgings in milk.
Cob house: Michael Buck built this house at the bottom of his garden for just £150 using natural or unwanted materials he found in skips
Interior: Mr Buck rescued the floorboards from a neighbour’s skip and used the windscreen of an old lorry to create several of the home’s windows
Cob houses are built according to a method thought to date back to prehistoric times which uses only earth, clay and straw.
In building the house, Mr Buck, rescued the floorboards from a neighbour’s skip and used the windscreen of an old lorry to create several of the home’s windows.
He even carried a 10ft wide bundle of reeds draped across his back on foot to avoid racking up a carbon footprint.