The Earthy-Crunchy strikes —[more]—
I've gotten a little bit obsessive about the summer camp project. We actually have enough money these days so the project can be launched, so (modulo the teeny detail of doing most of the work myself, which may prove problematic) the idea of actually building myself my own home has grabbed me by its sticky tentacles.
A few rounds of discussion of what would make a good home, with the best, the bears, and with people commenting on my previous posts on the subject has gotten it into my head that strawbale might actually be a good plan. There are more than enough online references to get totally confused (I can't help but notice that a lot of these references are Canadian, and it certainly looks like the Canadian Government, the various mortgage underwriters, and the zoning laws are a lot friendlier to strawbale than the US is), but if you can avoid the confusion (and the so-earthy-crunchy-that-you-want-to-die websites) you can find some stunning conventional houses where the earthy-crunchy only comes out in sensible ways.
So, I've revised the summer camp a little bit, so that it's suitable for being a summer camp or a house in a (Canadian) city:
I'm not an architect, so the design of this house is going slowly. The big changes with this plan is that it will probably end up being a post and beam frame instead of a balloon frame (I'm not sure how I'd erect a post and beam frame, but since you can actually buy post-and-beam house kits, I suspect that that problem has already been addressed) and that it's been redesigned to take advantage of passive solar heating. Note that this house looks something like the Big Yellow House -- this was not deliberate (except for the porch layout), but was simply a fallout from the interior design. It's a little bit larger now; it's up to 101 square meters (1088 square feet), because I added a bay to the ground floor to stick the south-facing windows out a bit.
If you look inside the house, you will probably not see the lack of a basement, but the house doesn't need one. I've kept the downstairs bathroom, but have tucked the washer, drier, and water heater (which will be an on-demand one for efficiency) under the stairs, accessable from a door under the stairs.
Why no basement? Why, because basements appear to be expensive (I did some online searches for contractors who build basements, but none of them bothered to have any sort of online estimation process. This spells expen$ive to me) while a simple rubble trench foundation appears to be not so expensive. And if I can knock US$25000 off the price of the house, that's US$25000 that I don't have to earn before I build the house. And it's a bonus that it would make it easier to build a masonry footing for a masonry heater, if I (and the local air pollution people) decided that that was the way to go to heat the house.
The upstairs of the house has a sneaky little trick in it; I've discarded the long wide corridor running from side to side in favor of adding closets for each bedroom (and a linen closet for the hall.) But, instead of having the closets go all the way up to the ceiling, I plan to make them 2 meters high and place a cathedral ceiling over them and the corridor. This brings in light from the two tiny windows placed up at the top of the eaves, plus it gives me 4.5 square meters (48 square feet) which I can use as a couple of little mini-lofts for people to climb up into if they need to work or want some (semi)-privacy.
I'm still not sure what to do with The Stucco Problem™ -- the University Of Oregon had a straw bale dorm experiment where they mentioned putting an air gap between the strawbale and the evil stucco. And if you're going to put an air gap in, why not just put a better surface on, one that will resist water and won't make us run screaming from the neighborhood? But that will take a little more research.
Comments
When I read the literature/propaganda about strawbale, the universal theme is that you need to let the bales breathe to the outside of the house, so that no moisture will get in and get stuck. I guess that's why everyone who builds strawbale uses evil stucco.
Since some amount of moisture will always be present it is essential to provide a way for the moisture to escape. Sealing both sides of the bales would trap all moisture inside and eventually lead to a serious mold problem.
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I'm amazed that the Oregon experimenters didn't put vapour barriers on both sides of the straw. It seems like common sense, especially if you'd read any of the reports of the Canadian R2000 projects in the 1980s.