A crew from Whole Trees Architecture and Construction spent Tuesday and Wednesday on our land and completed peeling all the trees that need peeling this summer to serve as the unmilled timbers we will be using to build our house next spring. Selected not only because they are the right […]
GUEST POST BY DELLA HANSMANN Read more of her thoughts on green building and design at Dwelling Places. Denise and Doug have been planning to build a house for a long time. They were thinking about this natural dream home from the time they bought land in rural Wisconsin in […]
When you are building a non-traditional house, you spend a lot of time wondering about things that people building in the usual 2×4, drywall, aluminum siding and asphalt shingle world can take for granted. But Doug and I want to be green pioneers and explore new ideas about sustainable structures. […]
The second weekend of our straw bale construction workshop (led by Mark Morgan of Bearpaw Design and Construction ), we got a chance to try earthen clay plastering on the interior walls of the building. The first weekend, we troweled concrete stucco on the outside of the straw bale walls. […]
Straw as a building material may seem sketchy the first time you think about it. But the more you learn, the more it makes sense. I am in the middle of a 6-day workshop adding the straw bale component led by straw bale building master and local legend Mark Morgan […]
We thought finding windows for the barn would be a simple matter of a couple of trips to the ReStore. We did find the door from the barn into the greenhouse there – a lovely solid oak door with glass so old, it has gone rippley. But we were up […]
Straw is a natural material that can be sourced very locally. Isn’t it great to see examples of straw bale construction popping up all over the world? I can make such a grandiose statement because I have found a really cool application of straw bale construction in England. The other […]
Here is your chance to learn about straw bale in some great workshops coming up very soon that still have openings. Bear Paw Construction and Whole Trees Architecture and Construction are teaming up on the construction of a one-of-a-kind home – the Kara Woods Residence on the grounds of the […]
I was shocked when our timber framer, Mike Yaker, urged us to forget painting the inch-thick oak boards on our new barn. To me the prototypical barn was barn red. I have always loved to see red barns. They look great against a background or green fields, golden wheat or […]
When we decided to build a barn on our land, our daughter/architect quickly sketched up a shape that would maximize future solar panels and provide the most possible headspace for a loft area where we could camp. We took her plan to Mike Yaker, a local timber framer, who crafted […]
Digging in the Driftless 