Update on Strawbale Home Construction Process

We have been making steady progress on this Buckland home, and will be finishing up soon! Before it is finished, we will host an open house to give you one more chance to experience the unique feeling of being in a naturally built home and to showcase what a completed strawbale structure looks like. Stay tuned for details!

The house is shaping up to be a sturdy structure with excellent insulation, a healthy indoor environment, and a natural, organic aesthetic. The process of building this house has been an ongoing opportunity to learn about best practices for natural building, as well as how to effectively combine “natural building” techniques and technologies with “green building” techniques and technologies.

What is the difference, you may be wondering? Green building tends to emphasize performance in terms of energy efficiency, while natural building takes into account the lifecycle of materials it uses and embodied energy of a project. For example, we chose to use lathe and plaster for our walls rather than sheetrock. This choice required more labor, but far less processed materials, and far less energy was used as a result. Lathe is comprised of small strips of wood, which we collected from the scraps of the wood we harvested and milled ourselves on-site. The plaster covering it is made from all natural clay, straw, and sand.

Clay plaster (components pictured above) is applied to strawbale walls (pictured below)

All of these materials were sourced locally. The straw came from our own leftover straw bales, the sand came from a company in Bernardston, and the clay was sourced from the nearby Sunderland company Delta Sand and Gravel. In fact, the clay is not only local but recycled—it formerly resided in the parking lot of the old buffalo farm along route 9 in Hadley, which is now being converted into another structure.

Another reason to use natural wall materials is their health benefits. These walls require no paint, and thus add no VOCs (volatile organic compounds, which are potentially harmful chemicals) to the home. Prioritizing local and sustainable materials, low embodied energy, and health benefits made lathe and plaster definitely the best choice for us! Those walls are all up now, and being plastered.

We are also adding trim detail to each doorway, using more of our lumber milled on-site. The shape of each doorway is unique and has a flowing, organic shape, which we feel adds character to the home.

Another aspect of the house that sets it apart is its siding detail. We estimate that 70-80% of the wood we are using for this project is from the site. These pine boards are positioned at an angle along the outside of the house to make it structurally stronger. (We also implemented this diagonal board design on the ceiling of the lower level/ floor of the upper level.) The walls of this house have many layers, including the pine siding, cellulose insulation, straw bale insulation, and several coats of clay plaster, which makes it high performing in terms of energy efficiency.

It is exciting to be closing in on finishing this strawbale home. We have learned a lot along the way! Stay tuned for a date for the next open house if you would like to check out the progress we have made.