Re: Straw Bale Homes & SIPs
From: Mac Thomson (macheartwoodcohousing.com)
Date: Mon, 20 Oct 2008 05:16:15 -0700 (PDT)
Our community was built a s a mixed development community -- that is, we offered both completed production built homes and lots for custom built homes. We ended up with 14 production built homes and 10 custom. Of the custom built homes, 8 are strawbale or strawclay (mixing loose straw with clay slurry and packing it into forms).

We considered strawbale, strawclay, and other alternatives for our production homes, but ended up ruling them out because although our area is a hot bed for alternative construction, there was no builder that had ever built more than just a couple alternative homes per season. Cost was also a huge factor. We ended up going with "super- stick" construction (super-insulated, solar oriented, 80+% sustainably harvested lumber) for our production homes.

In retrospect, both types of homes perform very well energy efficiency- wise, with the strawbale and strawclay homes probably doing just a bit better. (No hard data here, but no units have air conditioning and when it hits 100° outside, the strawbale and strawclay homes seem to do a little better staying cool.)

The strawbale and strawclay homes were all built as "natural-built" homes, meaning natural clay stucco, earth plasters, etc. Although there is more maintenance, this creates a really wonderful living space and I think all owners are very happy with that aspect.

Cost-wise, the "super-stick" homes were way cheaper for comparable quality finishes. When considering owner labor on the strawbale and strawclay homes, I'd estimate that they were on average about 50% more expensive per square foot. A good friend built his strawbale home for about the same or a little less than one of our production homes per square foot (not counting his, his wife's, or his daughter's labor), but he did most of the work (poured the slab, cut down and milled his trees, stacked the bales, ran the plumbing, framed interior walls, etc, etc, etc). Building strawbale and strawclay homes is VERY labor intensive. My friend had a big strawbale stacking party to build his first strawbale home (not at Heartwood), but ended up spending so much time fixing goof ups there that he decided to stack the bales on his Heartwood home himself with a trained crew. My experience is that any reports of alternative homes being cheaper assumes lots of free labor from the owner-builder, family, and friends.

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Our common house is post and beam construction. We used SIPS panels for the ceiling (plywood, foam, Tectum). They're worked out fine. I think they were fairly reasonable cost-wise. It was the post and beam that added the extra cost, but we ended up with a really beautiful dining room and hearth room.

Cheers,
Mac

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Mac Thomson

Heartwood Cohousing
Southwest Colorado
http://www.heartwoodcohousing.com


"You will do foolish things, but do them with enthusiasm."
              - Collette
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On Oct 14, 2008, at 7:23 PM, cohousing-l-request [at] cohousing.org wrote:

Date: Tue, 14 Oct 2008 14:27:56 -0400
From: Sharon Villines <sharon [at] sharonvillines.com>
Subject: [C-L]_ Straw Bale Homes & SIPs
To: Cohousing-L Cohousing-L <cohousing-l [at] cohousing.org>
Message-ID: <B66BF788-8CEE-47B5-8387-C4FC601D4230 [at] sharonvillines.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed; delsp=yes

I would like to hear from any households or communities that have
straw bale homes. People talk about them from time to time but I don't
think we've gotten any reports back.

Are you happy with them? What would you do differently? Were they
really energy efficient and/or low cost? What are the advantages and
disadvantages?

Same for SIPs.

Sharon
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Sharon Villines
Takoma Village Cohousing,Washington DC
http://www.takomavillage.org





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