greenspree.ca at The Sietch

Time for another update, I wish I could say it was good news.  We were hoping to have at least started on the driveway and house pad by the end of June but it’s looking unlikely now.  We bought out developement permit the end of last week and got all the info to our mortgage broker.

Last Friday I got a call from her where she suggested we go through CMHC, even though we have a 25% downpayment and can go with a standard mortgage, because the rates would be comparable and dealing with CMHC would somehow be easier.  It wasn’t.  Early this week she called back with some questions from CMHC on the strawbale construction and asked if we had experience in building with strawbales.  I replied no, but it being infill only it shouldn’t be an issue.  She said ok, and said she would talk to the CMHC.  The next day she sent us an a-mail stating we would need a structural engineer to review and stamp the drawings and be present at each of the draw inspections.

I was, and still am, quite confused at this request as our building structure is being built with conventional stick framing that exceeds the NBC requirements.  It seemed an arbritrary requirement and suggested that the CMHC representative didn’t have enough info on what we were doing to make informed recommendations.  The fact that they did anyways, and one that adds considerable costs and delays to the start of our project seems irresponsible and unprofessional to me and I said so in a reply to our broker.

She had said when sending me notification of the requirement that she would talk to her head office about handling the mortgage without CMHC and see if they would waive the requirement for an engineer.  So we wait now for a response from her company and a response from CMHC to my subsequent e-mail regarding our structural exceedence of the NBC.  Laine and I wanted our home to be an example of alternative building and owner built technology, that bale homes are affordable, buildable and legitimate.  Seems we’ll be fighting a battle for future bale builders with CMHC and our mortgage broker, I hope we can set a precedent and that it does get used in the future!

If however we fight and fail, we haven’t decided what the next step will be.  There is the option of going to completely conventional construction, maybe with a little more insulation,  but that option doesn’t appeal to us that much.  We could put off building another year and look for funding from other sources, another option we don’t relish.  We are really hoping we don’t have to exercise either of those options or any others, maybe another funding source would be possible this year, or maybe our letter to CMHC will change their minds, in any case, we’ll keep you posted!

Waste and inefficiency is by far the biggest contributor to climate change and pollution. If we still exploited cheap energy in the form of fosil fuels and still utilized man made amterials such as plastics for the last 50 years but used them efficiently and without waste and world would be in much much better shape.

The next time you go by a construction site, if you can (without putting yourself in harms way) look inside the dumpsters on site. Besides the waste from packaging you’ll vast amounts of still usable building materials simply thrown out because it is more cost effective to get rid of them than store them for future use on other jobs. I have taken 100′ coils of rope, pallets of polyicoanurate roof insulation, glazing units for windows ordered the wrong size, tools and more from job site dumpsters all over in my career in construction/design.

More after the fold.

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When deciding to go with a chest fridge for our future strawbale home one thing that came up was comfort and convenience. Having to reach down to the bottom of a chest freezer for items on a daily basis seemed a bit of a chore and having sliding tray on top so access to the bottom is unimpeded presents efficiency problems.

My first theoretical solution was to create a couple of racks of baskets attached to slim counter weights on some sort of frame inside the freezer and raise each rack up to access items under the top rack. Sketching of said system revealed a lot of fabrication, moving parts and complexities that would greatly increase the likelihood procrastination in it’s developement!

My second thought was to create the racks centered on a hollow steel pipe pillarwith a second capped sleeve over top and a gas charged lift arm from a hatchback or something to assist in lifting and locking the rack in place. This seemed perfectly simple and easily constructed and I excitedly ventured to my local u-pull autosalvage yard to get some prototype lift arms. This revealed an interesting fact, lift arms on car hatches, trunks, engine bonnets and rear doors all seem to fall within the 10-12″ extension range no matter the size or weight of the door. My plans called for at least an extension of 24″ to be truly effective and this sent me dejectedly back to the drawing boards after briefly toying with the idea o fusing two arms staged to provide 20-24″. When I really looked at that option critically it seemed like far too complicated.

So this brings me to option 3, not worrying about it till we try out the fridge as is with stardar baskets. Unless someone can point me in the right direction, I have too many other critical decisions and steps on the house this summer to give it much more thought right now. So leave a coment or send me an e-mail if you have any ideas!

Ethanol is a red herring, it can reduce net CO2 emmissions but will also require huge amounts of resources to grow, distill and distribute. In order for ethanol to replace gasoline all cars would need to be retooled to be able to run on 100% ethanol (the most currently available pump varieties are a blend with mostly gasoline; E10 or E15) plus to supply the world with enough ethanol to run all internal combustion engines could require more or most of the arable land that is currently available, leaving little or none for food production.

The real emphasis should be on changing how society consumes energy, making our processes more efficient and sustainable and harnessing the free and mostly unused energy the sun throws at us constantly. In fact the real crux of the matter is we need to reinvent the way we travel and move things. We need to reduce the number of vehicles and make the ones we use more efficient. Whether this means switching to biodiesel or hydrogen feul cells, electricity, etc… the most important step is to go on a car diet. Personal transportation should be reduced to next to nothing. Trying to force technology to catch up with our consumption is a batlle we have been steadily losing ground on for the last century and it shows.

More after the fold.

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I have been a lurker here on The Sietch for a couple years ever since I started thinking about alternative building and alternative energy and began seraching the net for any and all information on the issues. Recently my wife and I have taken the plunge and settled on a house plan, design and philosophy. We are building a smallish (<1200sf) two story strawbale home using a hybrid stickframe technique and unique passive solar design. Our main source of active heating will be from an EPA woodstove and standing deadwood from the family woodlot. This dry seasoned wood has been propped up in the woods since Hurricane Juan made the marathon trek up to Atlantic Canada and devasted many of our non hurricane environemnt trees. We are hoping to build a house that is comfortable, inviting, low consumption and built to last while using local and low pollutant causing materials. And we hope to inspire and educate others by hosting free informational and hands on workshops to those interested in learning and helping us out all along the construction process, and as we are building 95% of the house ourselves, the help will be needed!

We have also committed ourselves to a few sub-projects that we are going to try and perfect and implement into our house such as a chest fridge (some of you may be familiar with Tom Chalko’s example from his page and as reported on Treehugger.com) with a custom rack system to make the low chest orientation easier to deal with. We are also going to be using some reclaimed glazing units from a local office building construction site that were being discarded as they were ordered the wrong size. Finally I am working on some convenience projects for my Dad’s off grid cabin such as a water ram pump to bring up water from a nearby stream and a solar water heater for dishwashing purposes.

Our second longterm goal is to raise organic vegetables and perhaps goat and/or sheep on our 3 acre lot along with apples, pears, plums and peaches and setup a food sharing cooperative with the local rural community. There are already hobby scale meat chickenand duck producers in the neighborhood and some other veggie growers, we hope to expand the idea so that by sharing what you grow you get to sharing in everyone else’s harvests and thus have fresh local seasonal food most of the year.

Finally, we want to eventually quit our day jobs and open a campground/nature retreat and teach people about growing their own food, respecting nature and thinking about the connected systems of the earth that connect all we are and do.

I hope my contributions make a difference to some few people out there!