greenspree.ca at The Sietch

It’s been a long time since I’ve updated the status of our house project, one of the reasons being that we have been very busy!

As of Tuesday, we have our septic system and well installed, temporary power installed and foundation formed/poured c/w air circulation ducts and coloured hardener.

Some communication and weather issues have left us about a week or two behind, but we are hoping that won’t affect the straw bale raising date. The weekend I was to start forming the slab on grade, I went paintballing with my wife’s younger brother and severely sprained my ankle. The ER doctors the next day suspected a torn ligement or ruptured tendon and it was nearly a full two weeks before I could walk again or spend any time on my feet.

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Last night my wife and I spent three hours trimming the interlocking teeth of the ICF’s that will make up the perimeter form of our slab on grade. This task was supposed to have been completed on the weekend along with a major chuck of the slab forwaork itself however fate has decided to throw us another curve ball!

Saturday afternoon the family was together for a gam of paintball at a local field for my brother-in-law’s birthday and within the first 5 minutes of the first match I twisted my ankle in some mud bad enough to tear a ligament or two! Ouch. It left me immobilized that day and medicating with some beer at my father-in-law’s cottage. I had hoped that the sprain would feel better enough for me to get some work done on Sunday, alas it only felt worse. So after feebly attempting to do some work on the site, I relented into letting my wife take me to the ER. 4 hours later (wait times are an issue here!) I had clean x-rays and advice to take it easy, walk on it a little every day to strengthen the ligaments, and that it should be better in a couple weeks.

So I am suddenly behoven to ask friends and family for more help than I wanted to burden them with. Last nights chore of trimming the ICF’s was an easy chore with very little walking and no heavy lifting on a level smooth floor, it still left my ankle swollen and throbing by the end of the night and me exhausted!

We are still hoping to pour some concrete within a week or so, I’ll be posting photos when we get some more progress done.

Some photos of the pad, new power poles and layout of the septic field.  This weekend the formwork will begun and (hopefully) finished, with underslab plumbing, temporary power and concrete pouring happening next week!

This view is from the Shire Lane, the private road off of which our lot is located. The Shire Lane itself is on a quiet country dirt road called the Peters Road and surrounded by farm and woodlots. You can see our driveway branch off to the left and then head west as the Shire Lane curves right. In the foreground is our new puppy Rosie and in the mid ground my in-laws dog Caleb!

This view of our building pad is from the small parking area at the end of our driveway, in the background (south southwest) you can see the high tension power lines that skirt our property. They are a bit obtrusive but not too overwhelming and certainly carry a lot less power than most high tension lines entering big cities.

This view looking back at the house lot from the other side and pointing east northeast towards the neighbouring horse field. In the background you can see our little 12’x14′ deck we made last year before our wedding. you can clearly see the stakes and building lines that are set up on the pad.

This view looks back almost 180 degrees from the first shot and shows our new power pole on the left close to the trees. The power lines will enter underground from this point to minimize the amount of visible wires on the site. It also shows our view to the east where the sun rises over the spruce woods on the other side of the Peters Road and the acre and a half horse field between our lot and it.

This final shot of the house site is taken from the deck mentioned before. The hedgerow to the north of the building site will protect the house from cold north winds in the winter time. To the left of this photo, not visible is our 20’x20′ vegetable garden which is just starting to take off. We have had fresh salads which buttercrunch lettuce, radishes, spinach and lambs quarters all week long and can’t keep ahead of the lettuce!

This is where our septic field will be at the crest of a gully on the south east corner of our hectare lot. This is stitched from three photos so the perspective is a little off, but you can see where the high tension power line tower pointed out in the previous photo is. 2 feet of premium fill will be placed between the stakes to provide adeqaute filtration as we are sitting on a shelf of brick clay on our site.

Our strawbale home is moving forward! We ended up getting our mortgage approved through our broker without going through CMHC but had already started shopping elsewhere by then. We went to a bank and got a better deal and lower downpayment requirement and are going in today to sign the paperwork. We knew we were approved last week so went ahead and started the construction process rolling.

Monday the driveway and more importantly house pad were place and compacted on our lot! This seems to be a good time to go over the foundation construction to be used on our home.

We are going to install a Frost Protected Shallow Foundation (or FPSF) as both the base and finish floor of our home. The site was prepped by removing the top cover of topsoil down to the substrate level of indegenous undisturbed layer of brick clay. Then a layer of shale or crushed sandstone was installed level with the existing highpoint of the land and compacted with a vibratory roller. This is where we are at now, the next step will be to form a foundation, using the FPSF Guide developed by NAHB Research Center, Inc. and using Canadian AFI values found in US Army Corps Of Engineers AFI maps.

Our foundation will also be 8″ thick at the main section for two reasons, as a thermal heat sink, and to allow us to run 5″ round duct work in the slab which will be connected to a high level return plenum at the top of the second floor for redistributing rising heat from the wood stove and passive solar radiation.

I will add some photos and detail sketches on the weekend to this post, stay tuned!

How much land do you need to be self sufficient? Again inspired by Red State Green’s recents posts I decided to do some research on my own. Prior to this, in a comment on “A matter of national security”, I used some somewhat high output figures I found on another site that basically said about 0.11 of an acre would be all that is required for a family of four. I decided to find some better numbers and also instead of just going by 2000lbs of food per year per preson, use the recommended portions of the CanadaFood Guide.

Assuming everyone followed Canada’s food guide, and using chicken for meat and dairy alternatives and/or trading or somehow offsetting the cost of purchasing some of the food, this is how I see it breaking down (weights of food taken from http://www.stambaughfamily.com/equiv_1.html):

Food Guide per adult male:

10 servings (1/2cup) of vegatables and fruit. Lets say your servings are 1 cup of tomato, 1 cup of spinach, 1 cup of carrot, 1 cup of cabbage and 1 cup of potato. That corresponds 74kg of tomato, 50kg of spinach, 55kg of carrot, 110kg of cabbage, and 83kg of potato per year.

8 servings of grain products. Lets use 4 servings of oats and the equivalent in flour of four servings of bread. That corresponds to 21kg of oats and 20kg of wheat flour per year.

2 servings of dairy. Lets assume soy drink, 1 cup ea. or approx. 23kg of soya beans per year.

3 servings of meat and alternatives. Let’s use chicken for all three (75g ea.) That’s 82kg per year.

More after the fold.

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Red State Green » Blog Archive » A matter of national security

Fellow The Sietch blogger Red State Green has posted an interesting article on self sufficiency and food supplies.  She has garnered a lot of attention on the post with dozens of comments ranging from support to abject scorn.

Most of the scorn seems to be coming from folks who are saying things like:

Uh… don’t want to rain on your self-sufficiency parade or anything, but do you also intend to build a fortified castle around your Victory Garden? Because if you don’t and civilization collapses because we can’t get Big Macs anymore we’re heading straight for the homestead that has all the chickens, pigs, and home-made preserves.

Mmmm. Jellies and jams.

And:

Are you serious? This is the most ridiculous idea I have heard yet. Oil embargo equals starvation? Give me a break. For one, you aren’t right in saying most of the food is produced in other countries. Yes, most of what we eat is made in other countries, but we export far more food than we import. The breadbasket of the USA (you have heard of the entire midwest, right?) could easily support the entire country. Also, higher food costs aren’t really a big deal, given that we already have some of the lowest food costs in the world.

But let’s take a step back and assume that this absurd principle could work. No gas in the cars? Uh oh… I guess that means walking or biking are out of the question. I bet people would kill each other over gardens before thinking about, I don’t know, walking to the store.

Let’s take the other scenarios. Terrorists bombing all our pipelines is not only unreasonable (since the United States is in anti-terror mode), but given that this country runs on oil, it would probably take only a few days to fix, causing at most a small spike in prices. A flu pandemic is an unlikely but possible occurrence, though I think the flu might be slightly more concerning than plans for food. Come on. No quarantine causing starvation would be placed into effect — the starvation could kill far more than the flu.

Victory gardens were a wonderful way to make people feel involved in WWII, but they weren’t the difference between life and death for Americans. This situation isn’t any different.

And I have to wonder if these people really think it is better to not have any means of self sufficiency at all then learn how to garden and provide at least a portion of your own food?

Another common theme was “aconomies of scale” and the great myth that commercial agriculture is the only efficient way to raise crops and livestock.  I don’t even know where to start with that notion, I suggest those that believe that do some serious research on traditional and third world farming practices and let me know what they conclude.

I came across this discussion in the comments section of Peak Oil Debunked’s post on the chest fridge idea from the famous mtbest article. The gist of the argument, and I have posted the relevant parts of the argument against the chest fridge, was that the orientation of the cooling device would make no difference and that the original author was sacrificing a large amount of food storage. Seeing as the original post and discussion took place two years ago I doubt I will get a response, but have decided to post my thoughts on it here.

My take on the subject is that you can buy two 15cf deep freeze’s for the same price as one side by side refrigerator freezer unit and have one set up to be a fridge and use the other as is. In my research, the standard 25cf fridge/freezer has a 15cf fridge side and 10 cf freezer side. My research also shows that similarly sized chest freezers use less energy than upright refrigerator only models. So you can in fact have more storage and pay less in utility bills for it!

More after the fold.

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What came first? Cheap energy in the form of fossil fuels or ever increasing levels of consumption? And what relationship did they have on each other? I have heard many analysts, politicians, pundits and thinkers throw out the statement that cheap oil has artificially propped up the pace of developement and the rate of consumption in places like America. This may sound reasonable and valid, oil and coal are cheaper in terms of extraction and conversion to usable energy than almost any other source. But does this account for the explosion in technology and material wealth enjoyed by so many since the The Great Depression? Could there be other factors that helped out or were maybe even more of an influence?

John Maynard Keynes was a British economist that developed and advocated what is roughly the same theories used today in modern capitalist countries. In simplist terms, he advocated basing the economy on consumption levels and spending out of depressions. The wikipedia artical on Keynesian economics states:

In Keynes’s theory, macroeconomic trends can overwhelm the micro-level behavior of individuals. Instead of the economic process being based on continuous improvement in potential output, as most classical economists had believed from the late 1700s on, Keynes asserted the importance of aggregate demand for goods as the driving factor of the economy, especially in periods of downturn. From this he argued that government policies could be used to promote demand at a macro level, to fight high unemployment and deflation of the sort seen during the 1930s. This however is contrasted by Supply-side economics. Keynes believed that the government was responsible for helping to pull a country out of a depression. If the government increases its spending, then the citizens are encouraged to spend more because more money is in circulation. People will start to invest more, and the economy will climb back up to normal.

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Over the last year my wife and I have been trying to overcome a serious and expensive habit. Eating out for lunch! We moved from a downtown apartment two blocks from our work to her folks place 26km from town. Before we would simply walk home for lunch, get something from the fridge, eat and head back to the office. No longer having that convenient option available to us we had gotten into the habit of meeting for lunch somewhere and paying 15-20 a day!

This had to stop so we decided we would start bringing our lunches to work. At first we would bring sandwiches in baggies, instant soup in disposable bowls, yogurt in disposable cups, some fruit or sometime veggies in another baggie and put them in a grocery bag. This inevitably led to much cost savings but much more waste. Our meal may have only cost us $4 but we were throwing out two containers, a baggie or two, grocery bag and whatever compost was left over. We started getting irritated at this and decided to look for solutions.

More after the fold.

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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!