Nearly three years later… I have finally started digging a spot for the outbuilding.
It doesn’t look like much but represents a real start to a long-delayed project.
Here are some of the rocks removed so far:
If field stones ever become a precious commodity, I’ll be set for life. 
In January, 1998 my house had no grid power for almost two weeks due to the Ice Storm. It wasn’t comfortable for even one day - no heat, lights, running water, or even a way to make a cup of tea. On day two I drained the plumbing to prevent freezing damage; packed up my toothbrush, computer, and chainsaw; and headed to my mom’s house in the city, leaving the house plants for dead.
| Almost immediately I subscribed to Home Power magazine (which I still read, though I don’t learn as much as I used to). By chance, the current issue contained an article about a strawbale building, the first time I had ever heard of the idea. At first it sounded a bit daft, but I suppose the seed of the project was planted in my mind. |  |
Meanwhile Energy Probe - one of the charities I was contributing to at the time - continued to send grimmer and grimmer news about Ontario’s grid. I find Ontario’s heavy dependence on dirty and expensive nuclear power particularly scary. But beyond that the whole system is a financial disaster as well, mostly hidden until the last few years by government subsidies.
It was already a cinch to go offgrid with my distant plans for a new house, since it would be sited well away from existing power lines. The expense of running ugly wires to the site would easily exceed the cost of a small solar electric system with batteries.
At this point I decided to try to make my current house offgrid capable and learn some lessons prior to building a new one. The house, which I still live in today, is a cookie-cutter ranch bungalow oriented towards the road instead of the sun. Not the worst house imaginable by any means, but a very poor candidate for independence.
The first thing one needs to consider when going off-grid is how to reduce the amount of electricity needed as much as possible. In this case the house had an electric range, electric water heater, and electric dryer on 220V which would be simply impossible to run on solar power with the size of system that I could afford. What to do? I took some bad advice and converted those appliances to propane.
Aside from the expense of this conversion, now the house actually depends on three grids! Only failure of the power grid will cause the house to become immediately uninhabitable. But if heating oil for the furnace, or propane for the other stuff, becomes too expensive or difficult to get in this area, it will be a serious problem. Hopefully by then I won’t own the house anymore…
I recently finished watching a DVD with the ungainly title Building With Awareness: The Construction of a Hybrid Home. It covers a strawbale construction project similar in many ways to my own.
The disc tries, somewhat successfully, to accomplish a lot of goals:
To be fair, there’s no way this much material can be covered in depth with only 3 hours of runtime. Or in my case around 2 hours since I watched most of it at 1.5x or 2x speed on the DVD player.
In fact there is an alternate audio track with more narrated information, but I didn’t have the patience to sit through all of it. Maybe if I hadn’t read all those strawbale books it would have held my interest a bit longer. Further gripes:
Highlights of the DVD for me were the earthen plastering tips, and bonus video “How To Split a Strawbale” - just a few short minutes, the rest I would not consider watching twice.
In summary: a disc possibly worth renting (especially if you haven’t read any books on the subject), but probably not worth buying (if you’re on a tight budget like mine). Wondering where can you find such an obscure title? I got it from Zip.ca, a Canadian rent-by-mail service.
…which leads me to mention a recent development. Since my last entry I made a new page showing all the latest titles available for rent from Zip. This is information you can’t get easily on the Zip website so I wrote some code to ferret it out.
This isn’t the entry I intended to write, nor is this the time when I intended to write it. An early frost was the latest distraction, resulting in the forced harvest of millions many dozens of tomatoes, among other things. Expect another post real soon.
I like to refer to the Project as a strawbale house, but that’s a bit misleading. The role of strawbales in this project will probably be limited to insulation of exterior walls. It would be more accurate to call it a mostly-natural-materials house - doesn’t roll off the tongue quite as nicely though, does it?
The decision to use natural materials came easily. Over the past twenty years or so my diet has changed from mainstream to mostly organic vegetarian fare. At the same time, my sensitivity to chemicals has increased dramatically. Just a whiff of a solvent, fragrance, or other vapour can provoke a devastating migraine.
However, the choices in natural building materials are fairly limited: stone, mud, straw, and wood just about covers it. Of those, only straw provides really good insulation - essential for the cold winters in this part of Canada.
There are many points in favour of strawbale construction, but these are the ones which convinced me:
My first reaction to the idea of strawbale construction was concern about fire, rot, insects, and rodents. For sure, exposed bales are vulnerable to all of these things. However, plastered bale walls in a properly detailed building are much more resistant to such threats than standard stick-frame / fiberglass-insulated / vinyl-sided houses.
Further reading:
…
I’m off to a bit of a slow start with this blog, more than two weeks passed since the first entry. There’s always lots of distractions, but I plan to post at least once each week.
| Seventy beautiful golden dry straw bales are stacked in my garage, ready for the next phase of the project. It’s a major milestone, and seemed like a good time to begin this journal. |  |
At end of June I rode my bicycle a couple of miles down the road to speak with a local farmer. Unlike most around here who seem to do hay only, he grows a bit of barley for straw. My preliminary design called for 55 standard sized bales, so I asked for 60 to be on the safe side.
The weather was favourable, and at the beginning of August we scheduled delivery to coincide with the harvest. A fine Sunday morning at 7am the wagon rolled in my driveway to drop off the bales. He had a few extra, and just as well since they measure a bit short of the “standard”. On average these bales are only about 32″ long, compared with 36″ that the strawbale books talk about.
Next steps: