strawbale Archives - Living Craft

Straw Construction in the Media!

The Build Well project, a project of the Ecological Building Network, has produced a stunning new video, featuring long time straw bale construction advocate and structural engineer, Bruce King, as the host and narrator. Well worth a watch, this short documentary talks about the history of straw bale construction and the use of straw as a building material. It goes on to showcase the straw bale building revival in various new forms — including straw structural insulated panels (S-SIPS) — and the future of building with straw and other plant and bio based materials, including hemp and sheep’s wool.

These natural plant and animal based products reduce the carbon impact of our buildings by harnessing nature’s own processes, plus they create healthy buildings for the people crafting them and the people living in them. A bio-based building revolution would be one of the fastest ways to draw down atmospheric carbon and help reduce the impacts of climate change! Bruce believes that we can turn the built environment into “a carbon absorber within a generation.” So let’s get to work, together!

Green and Low Carbon Building Interview

Frank participated in a brief interview on green building in Colorado with Boulder, CO radio station KGNU. Both Living Craft and Rodwin Architecture were represented after our joint presentation at The Eco-Social Solutions 2018 conference at CU Boulder. Click below to give it a listen, and be sure to read the whole article at KGNU’s site, linked below.

http://news.kgnu.org/2018/02/green-building-and-carbon-reduction/

The Story of the Truth Window

When you’re new to straw bale building, one of the first things you may notice or hear about is the “truth window.”

What exactly is this feature? It seems to me like a fun little joke within the community of straw bale builders and/or homeowners, where a small part of the wall (interior or exterior) is left without plaster, so that the straw is visible. This acts as proof to unbelieving guests and visitors that the walls are actually insulated with straw bales.

The truth window opening is covered with non-removable glass, left open, or has a door that opens and closes to allow the straw to be both seen and touched. However, we STRONGLY recommend sealing this section of the wall and detailing it well to prevent air and moisture from moving through the walls via this penetration. A simple pane of glass embedded in the plaster should do the trick.

Designing a truth window is a fun process where you can express your style and individuality by customizing the trim, shape, or other features. A quick online image search can give you inspiration, or check out a few we’ve worked on and around.

RMNBC 2017 Recap

Living Craft owners were recently proud to be speakers, sponsors, planners, and attendees of the 2017 Rocky Mountain Natural Building Conference, co-hosted by the Colorado Straw Bale Association and Common Earth. It’s been a fun and exhausting process through which we learned a lot, both about hosting a conference, as well as all the learning opportunities from speakers and other attendees of the event.

This year’s event was a blast, where we finally had a chance to meet other straw bale and natural building enthusiasts and reconnect with our mentors and friends from past natural building endeavors. The scope of the conference was broader than similar events put on by COSBA in the past, as we were striving to connect straw bale with other building techniques and ideas which can offer their own unique benefits. Speakers and attendees included earthen and adobe builders, hemp builders, building scientists and passive house experts, timber framers, architects, permaculturists, and landscape and greywater systems designers.

Frank was the emcee for the event, and Ben and Frank gave a presentation titled: Natural Building in the Urban Environment – Low Hanging Fruit. Cheryl was on a panel with several of her mentors and peers, discussing Intergenerationality in Natural Building.

Other highlights were Deva Racusin of New Frameworks Natural Design Build discussing building science and the important role of natural building materials and techniques in the green building movement. There is a huge opportunity for natural builders to promote building homes that not only have low energy use during their operation, but are also made of materials that sequester carbon within the structure of the building itself. By using plant based materials like straw, wood, cellulose, and hemp, instead of carbon emitters like steel, concrete, and mineral wool, the immediate carbon footprint of the building is significantly lower. This is absolutely essential to fight climate change in the moment, rather than waiting for benefits to offset inputs after 20-30 years or more. His business partner wrote a great article that goes into more detail about sequestering carbon in buildings.

The Friday night panel discussion with Deva, Mike Wird, Brian Fuentes, Emily Niehaus, and Derek Roff was also a really fun and informative discussion. The crowd was able to get involved by asking question via a website, which other audience members could vote on to lead the topic of conversation to areas of highest interest. Mike’s discussion of leverage points was inspiring and artful, as was Emily’s reminder that we all have more to give, as her upcoming role as mayor of the town of Moab illustrates.

An impromptu 5×5 panel on Saturday night allowed some of our friends for CASBA (California Straw Building Association) to share the results of wildfires on several straw bale homes which were impacted in recent wildfires across the state. We are truly impressed again and again by the durability of straw buildings with lime plaster, as several homes were left intact even after other non-straw structures nearby were damaged or destroyed.

Finally, COSBA and other anonymous donors, along with event attendees, were able to raise a significant donation to Liz Johndrow’s Pueblo Project, a non-profit that teaches local Central American people how to build with adobe and clay, and improve their homes’ durability, beauty, and comfort with these simple and affordable techniques. She’s hosting a natural building conference of her own in Guatemala this year.

There was too much fun to fully recount here, but Living Craft would like to fully extend our gratitude and love to our community for joining us on this amazing weekend. We hope to continue to work with all the folks we met and those we didn’t get a chance to talk with.

‘Til the next one, friends! #RMNBC2017

Horsetooth Strawbale Residence

This beautiful contemporary southwest style home, built by Black Timber Builders, features straw bale insulated walls, interior clay plasters, and tadelakt showers, sink, and kitchen backsplash by Living Craft.

Urban Strawbale Addition

This straw bale addition features very high performing straw bale insulation with lath and slip straw above the windows. Warm interior clay wall plasters and smooth tadelakt windowsills give it a modern but cozy feel. Lime-washed tongue-and-groove beetle killed pine ceilings on the vaulted ceiling open up the space. Read the case study about our process to learn more about how it all went together.

The Philosophy of Natural Building

What is Natural Building?

This is a hard question to answer, and has been the topic of many classroom and late night bonfire discussions. For us, it breaks down to a few basic principles:

Local

We try to use materials that are found or produced locally and have as little embodied energy as possible. We want to support the local economy and the people within it. I would love to use bamboo, but if I have to ship it across the Pacific, it’s probably not the best material to use.

Non-Toxic

We use materials that are not harmful to the people producing, installing, or living among them.

Healthy

Not only do we want the inhabitants and the environment to be healthy, but also the building itself. Too many of our new homes are riddled with moisture issues and bad air quality. By creating a vapor permeable wall system, we don’t trap moisture where it doesn’t belong. Instead, we allow it escape harmlessly, without negatively impacting the performance or longevity of the building.

Low Impact

Low embodied energy, with the least extractive methods possible. This allows an efficient building to begin immediately having a positive effect on slowing down climate change, rather than having to “pay back” the energy that went into and emissions that were produced while creating the materials.

Sustainable

This term gets thrown around a lot, and seems to have lost some of it’s true meaning. There are three tiers of sustainability: Economy, People and the Environment.

Economy

We want to use products that are literally dirt cheap. With cheaper materials, the customer saves money. Sometimes these materials require a little more labor, which puts more money into the pockets of local tradesmen instead of going to the large corporation.

People

We prioritize the use of local materials that help support people in our community. We also try to make sure these materials are non-toxic to anyone who comes in contact with them.

Environment

Our focus is on finding and incorporating into our design the materials with the lowest embodied energy possible. We also try to think in a cradle-to-cradle mindset. We want our buildings to last forever, but at the point it reaches its end of life, it shouldn’t contribute to the waste stream. With natural materials like clay, hemp, and straw, much of the building is compostable or can be put back into the natural environment after its disassembled.

Magnolia

West Boulder County passive solar strawbale home. Designed by Fuentes Design. Built by Earthrise Homes. Plasters by Artesano Plaster and Living Craft. Custom carpentry by Frank of Living Craft, with Earthrise Homes and Grimes Carpentry.

Case Study: A Straw-Cell Addition

Living Craft Design has been working on a straw bale addition to our friends’ home in Boulder. This family is already well-versed in the benefits of natural building, so their addition incorporates passive solar heating with large, south-facing windows and a concrete slab floor to hold all that sun-generated heat. The addition has the high insulation value (R-value) that is a great feature of straw bales as a building material. Additionally, the family chose to renovate the original rooms of their home and filled the walls and ceilings with densely-packed blown cellulose as part of that process. This home will be comfortable year-round and have low energy bills as well as a reduced need for running heating and cooling systems.

A Straw-Cell Design

We jumped into the project starting with straw bale installation. This house has what’s called a straw-cell wall, with an entire wall system behind the bales, complete with wood studs, recycled denim insulation, and exterior wood siding. The bales then are stacked on the inside of this wall, meaning that labor is reduced because you don’t have to cut or trim as many bales to fit within and around the walls’ wood frames. You also only need to apply plaster to the interior side of the bales.

Low Carbon

A great thing about the insulation materials used in this home is that they are all carbon-based, and will now be locked away in the walls of this home for a very long time. This is actually a form of carbon sequestration, one technique to keep atmospheric carbon down and help mitigate climate change. This is in direct contrast to insulation materials like foam, fiberglass, and mineral wool, which consume a lot of energy to create. This means that the manufacture of those materials produces a lot of greenhouse gas emissions, upping their carbon footprint.

Healthy, Natural Plasters

Applying a base layer of clay plaster at the work party.

Our next step was to start the plasters. A base coat of local red clay was applied to cover the bales first. At a fun summertime work party hosted by the family, we added a leveling coat which will provide the base and shape for the finish plasters. We introduced some folks to the techniques and tools for mixing and applying natural clay plasters and played in the mud with good friends. We also started to build out the windowsills into their final shape using a lime and clay mixture with lots of straw for strength.

Ben talks building with some volunteers while others work on shaping the windowsills.

The finish plaster drying around the laundry room window.

The final wall finish was customized to get the exact color and texture that our clients wanted, and this last, thin layer of clay-based plaster went on like a dream. Thanks to additions like wheat paste, it dries into a hard and durable finish that will last for years, and also be easily reparable in case of accidental damages.

During the wall finish process, we were preparing for and creating the tadelakt windowsills that will become perfect benches for sitting on and reading in the natural light. This Moroccan finish plaster is created from lime, which is why the base coat for the sills incorporated lime with the clay. This results in a tight bond between the materials. The smooth layers of lime were applied, soaped, and burnished using stones to create a shiny finish. The sills were then waxed as the final step to create a long-lasting surface that can withstand some use.

The burnished and waxed tadelakt windowsills have an amazing shine and reflection, as well as feeling silky smooth.

The End Result: A Beyond Green Building

We’re departing this project with lots of hope for the future which will unfold in this family’s happy, healthy, non-toxic, and environmentally friendly home. Not only will it be a beautiful space to raise a family, but also a good model for other front range homeowners looking to sustainably add some space and renew their original home.

Case Study: Repairing a Strawbale Home

after-sponge-coat — The home after we applied a thin lime plaster over all the repairs.

Our clients for this project had finished building their own straw-bale home in the mountains west of Boulder about a decade ago. However, the harsh mountain climate and some details of the design and material selection had led to failures in areas of plaster, particularly around windows and in places where the roof drainage lacked adequate gutter systems.

The lime-stabilized earth layer which was used to repair damaged areas of the home, seen as the darker, lower level in this picture, has been built out by the homeowner to the same level as the original lime plaster. Now it’s ready to get a thin lime plaster over them all, to blend the different sections of the home together.

We worked with them to come up with a solution that would allow them to participate in the repair work, while using our experience and tools to speed up the process and get the home ready for winter.

First steps were to remove the lime plaster where it had begun to delaminate from the clay plaster base coat below. This happens because of a reaction between the two materials that creates a silt layer which prevents them from bonding, weakening the walls. In some areas, water had eroded the clay base coats, and we needed to mix and apply a clay plaster to build out everything to the same level. Next, we mixed up an intermediate lime-stabilized earth plaster to apply on top of the clay base coat. This in-between layer helps bond the two materials by creating a transition. The homeowners applied both of these layers by hand after we mixed up several batches and staged them around the house. They also took the opportunity to enhance and add some sculptural elements, including the house number in relief on the side of the wall.

We also added metal flashing around windows and below siding to move any water running off the building out to the surface of the wall and keep it from infiltrating into the plaster again. A final sponge-finished lime plaster over the whole house covers up any differences between the old and new and seals boundaries to prevent water from eroding the surface.

We will be able to go back in the spring next year, once temperatures are consistently above freezing, to apply a final colored coat over their home. This entire process will ensure that the will last for many decades to come, even in the harsh mountain winters.