Handbuilt Green

I wrote the article below last winter for our presbytery exec, who promptly left and became the executive presbyter for Greater Atlanta presbytery (Godspeed, Tom), so I'm posting it here for your reading pleasure. Two comments: first, the image here is of our laundry room, not our home, but it shows clearly some of the technologies we use (e.g., strawbales, earthbag foundation, recycled window). Second, I've found that some people think handbuilt homes are "unpatriotic," in that to consume on credit in our country is the primary way we as good citizens keep the economy going. I don't subscribe to that notion at all. Rather, a gradual transition to green/efficient/non-petroleum based economies seems to me to be very patriotic. Anyway, thank you for reading.

Handbuilt Green Strawbale Home in Alabama

“What if we could build a house for less than $10,000.00,” Nancy and I asked ourselves in 2007. Having adopted Dave Ramsey’s “no debt” financial management, and noticing anxious trends in the housing and financial markets, we realized that if we could build a house for such a low amount and sell our existing house, we would find ourselves debt-free with a good chunk of change in the bank. And once our youngest child, our daughter, graduated from college in 2010, we’d have a rosy net worth with invaluable peace about our financial future. We believed we could accomplish this if we imposed some limits on our lifestyle, particularly if we built a much smaller house that the one we had but also if we limited the cost of operating our planned home.

Well, I’m typing this in our 500 square foot home, which is at a comfortable 72 degrees while being heated by forty cents worth of wood (locally bought at four cents per pound) in our wood stove even though it’s blustery and in the high 30’s outside, we have no debt, our daughter is on track to graduate, we have a nice chunk of change in the bank, and we built our home for $7,500.00 instead of $10,000.00. And the key piece in our financial plan, building an economical house for the cost of a decent used car, we accomplished by building with green technologies.

“Green technologies” are products and materials that reduce environmental impacts in their manufacture and save energy in their use. Most people are aware of green technologies due to their increasing visibility in advertising for products ranging from light bulbs to cars to entire buildings. I call green technologies that are manufactured for sale to the building industry “commercial green.” In the construction industry, commercial green technologies tend to add twenty to twenty-five percent to the cost of a building’s construction, so we realized we couldn’t reach our building goal by using commercial green technologies.


However, commercial green technologies are not the only green technologies available. For half a century, what I would call “base communities” in this country have promoted and constructed “handbuilt” homes based on the principal of individual rather than commercial construction. And while we certainly support commercial green technologies in the construction industry (indeed, we use some of these technologies in our home), I’d like to tell you about my and Nancy’s work in “handbuilt green” construction in the building of our home.

We define handbuilt green along three parameters: minimal size and cost of construction, handbuilt from local green materials, and minimal use of utilities in the finished home. Nancy and I planned our home, which we refer to as our “private area,” in conjunction with my brother’s and his wife’s private area, seeking to shrink these homes to their bare essentials. Their private area is approximately 600 square feet, ours is 500 square feet, and we share a laundry building of 100 square feet. So our private area plus half of the laundry room comes to 550 square feet and includes a bedroom, a living room with a wood stove, and a reading/office area in one great room, an outdoor kitchen on our back porch, and our bathroom and shower in the laundry building (our shower is actually outdoors, too).

Having planned our house to be of minimal size, we sought to build it for the least amount of money possible. Since we live in St. Clair county, the only building code we have is for the septic system, meaning we could do every phase of our construction without hiring licensed subcontractors (which most building codes require) apart from installing the septic tank and field lines. That meant we could avoid labor costs altogether: since Nancy and I have built three homes previously, we were skilled in all aspects of home construction. Yet even without paying labor costs, our target of spending between $10.00 and $20.00 per square foot for our new home seemed unduly optimistic, given the costs of materials.

We beat these material costs by following the second principle – handbuilt from local materials – assiduously. Our home is a modified timber frame construction with strawbale infill walls. The timber frame consists of 4x6 pressure treated posts with a conventional roofing system topped with asphalt shingles. The frame and roof use conventional construction materials, so our savings were not noticeable (apart from labor). However, the rest of the house uses non-conventional construction materials, all produced locally. Our strawbale walls rest on earthbag stem walls resting on a gravel fill foundation.

After hiring a local excavator to dig our foundation trenches ($600.00), we installed a French drain and filled the trenches with gravel from a local supplier. We used the dirt we excavated from the trenches for three purposes: first, we filled sandbags with a moist mixture of this dirt, set them in place and tamped them down straight and level, forming foundation walls. Imagine big, heavy but somewhat floppy bricks stacked with recycled barbed wire between the courses to serve as “mortar.” On these stem walls we stacked our strawbales – small, square bales roughly 14” x 18” x 36” – again just like you’d stack bricks in a brick wall. Second, we mixed our excavated dirt with chopped straw as a binder, forming an earthen plaster base coat for our final two coats of lime plaster. Finally, we screened our excavated dirt and added straw to form an earthen floor in the living and office areas. After finishing the floor using an English recipe of high-content clay soil, a soil we were lucky to find elsewhere on our property, we hardened the floor with boiled linseed oil and finished with three coats of polyurethane.

To address the third parameter – minimal use of utilities – Nancy and I decided to design our home as a passive solar home. Passive solar technologies rely on three factors: southern exposure with lots of south wall windows, a high mass heat storage system, and excellent insulation. In addition, we sought to construct these systems as greenly as possible. The long axis of our home, which encloses the earthen floor, faces due south with forty percent of the wall area comprised of windows. We calculated the roof overhangs to allow the sun to shine on the floor beginning with the autumn equinox and ending with the spring equinox. For high mass heat storage, our earthen floor is approximately five inches thick, tightly compacted and a natural dark brown color to absorb heat from direct sunlight. Realizing that the sun doesn’t always shine in Alabama, Nancy and I purchased a used wood stove and stovepipe for backup heat ($400.00).

Strawbales provide excellent insulation as well as being extremely green. Formerly, wheat farmers would burn off the wheat stalks left over from harvesting. Over the last twenty years, people have been convincing farmers to bale these stalks instead of burning them, offering handbuilders and contractors a building technique first used in this country in the mid- to late-1800’s. In fact, one of the longest-standing strawbale structures in this country is the Burris Mansion in Huntsville, built in the 1930’s. By using this waste product from wheat farming, we took advantage of their local availability (we bought ours out of a field in Cullman), low cost (we paid $3.25 per bale) and, most importantly, their high insulating properties. According to rigorous tests, strawbales stacked and plastered as we have done have an R-value exceeding 40. Consequently, our home functions successfully, deriving most of our heat from the sun.

To reduce our electricity demand further, we opted to forego large appliances, having no air conditioning (we will reverse the passive solar heating process for the summer, using the floor to help cool the house) or tank water heater (our heater is tankless), two of the greatest electricity users in a conventional house. We also use low-wattage fluorescent bulbs throughout the house. In fact, our entire home is on one thirty-amp circuit. In the near future, we will convert our toilet to a grey-water system to help conserve drinking water (with which we flush our toilets in this country) and the energy costs of producing clean water.

I’m certain handbuilt advocates will recognize and applaud most of these construction techniques. We could be greener still, for instance, by using wood scavenged from other construction sites, foregoing the pressure treated posts and the poly on the floor. And conventional home owners usually respond to our construction story by asserting that they would never have to skills and time to construct their home themselves, much less using such non-conventional building materials. Building one’s own home takes gumption above all, and though I believe people have reserves of gumption just waiting to be freed from conventional approaches, I recognize that all of us have limits

But in conclusion, I’d like to advocate for the limits associated with minimal construction. Nancy and I have found these limits to be, surprisingly, liberating. In our small house, we’ve found we focus on having enough space instead of too much. So we focus on what we need instead of want, of having the right piece of furniture in the right place instead of furnishing an entire room. We’ve found a growing pride in being radical rather than being extravagant, recognizing that our lifestyle places few demands on both our environment and us, since we are liberated from much of the maintenance and expense of larger homes. Finally, our small space has given us a renewed intimacy with each other: since we’re always in the same room with each other, we share time and space much more often than we did in our former home. Further, we share a deep intimacy with our home, not just because of its small size, but because the effects of our hands appear all over it. We’ve found the liberating force of small home construction to be one of the best benefits from building green.