HOW LOW CAN WE GO? When we first started thinking about designing a new house some eight years ago, I said I wanted a passive solar design and a house that was so well insulated that we could heat it with a candle. Years of study have taught me that […]
Last summer (see my post Peeling Trees for our House) we selected the trees on our land that will be used to build our house, and Tuesday December 5, 20011, our construction foreman, Bryan Dalstrom started felling those trees so they can be prepped for construction, working with Kellen Anderson […]
Your roller coaster creeps slowly, slowly toward the top of the track, and for a moment, you pause before plummeting. It’s a moment in which you are eager for the thrilling plunge and yet, you may also be asking yourself whatever possessed you to get on this ride. There is […]
When you decide to build something, these days you have a choice of four primary building materials : Steel Concrete Processed Wood Wooden timbers Which one would you guess is the most sustainable? Unmilled timbers are what we using to build our house, which is currently a tiny subset of […]
It looks like we may be excavating the building site and pouring part of our foundation within a few weeks! This will be the third time we have ripped open the earth, and each time feels traumatic when the bulldozers and backhoes have at it. We had to dig into […]
Last weekend we got to visit the Whole Tree Construction, straw bale house that we helped build last year. Doug and I participated in a 6-day strawbale, clay wall workshop. (See posts Straw bale – Bending Walls , Stitching Straw Bales Makes Strong Walls, and Earthen Clay on Straw Bales […]
Acoustic tomography. Ever heard of it? This is a nondestructive imaging technique to determine what’s going on inside a tree. According to “Evaluation of Acoustic Tomography for Tree Decay Detection,” internal decay is an ever-present possibility which seriously compromises lumber production. For every 100 million board feet of timber […]
Our house will be built of unmilled timbers, which we selected from our woods (see my post How to Peel Trees). Most of them have been peeled and are starting to dry before they will be felled this winter. Some are too tall to peel until they are felled. It’s […]
If you had been in Washington D.C. in the past few weeks, you would have seem some very hopeful houses popping up like mushrooms on the Mall. Unlike mushrooms, these structures thrive on light. Every two years the U.S. Department of Energy hosts a Solar Decathlon where college teams design […]
We fell in love with our hilly land, but before we bought it, we were advised to have a soil evaluation report a.k.a. perk test done to see if we would be able to build an at-grade septic system instead of a mound system for our future (now not so […]
Digging in the Driftless 