The Straw House Blog - Home of Glen, Gil and Declan Hunter

Green magazine

Our house is featured in the latest issue of Green, an Australian magazine. The article is very nice - written by our friend and former neighbour Liza Finlay and the pictures by her cousin Naomi Finlay are spectacular. This article is the first to feature photos of our house in the winter. Aside from being one of our four favorite seasons winter provides lots of sun to the interior of the house. The pictures look sun drenched and warm on the interior, an excellent contrast to the snowy landscape outside.

We had a a photoshoot here a couple of weeks ago for a forthcoming coffee table book and the contrasts between the two photographers and publications was remarkable. Naomi captured images of a house that people live in, including one fantastic shot of Gil and Declan that we’ll treasure forever (cliche though that may be). The coffee table book people don’t seem to want any people in the pictures at all. In fact another of their books that we looked through did not have a single living creature in any of the houses featured. In fact some of the houses didn’t even seem to have furniture. Le Corbusier, one of my least favorite architects described houses as “machines for living” and the houses in this book had been staged to the point where the interface between house and human was tenuous at best. So why did we agree to be in the book? It was a last minute request from our architects and I didn’t have a chance to check out any of the other books from this publisher beforehand.

Posted by: Glen: October, 05, 2008

Green Home and Garden Tour

Peterborough Green-Up a local environmental group is holding a green home and garden tour on June 7, 2008, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. We’re a part of the tour in addition to several interesting homes and businesses in Peterborough proper.

Details are available on the Green-up website.

Normally if you’d like a tour of our house you have to wait for the annual OSBBC Straw House Tour in October, so this is an early opportunity if October doesn’t work for you.

From the Green-up site: Take a tour of homes and businesses where real people are making real changes to reduce their impact on our local resources. These sites will showcase some of the inspirational environmental examples that residents in Peterborough are setting through personal actions.

Tour locations highlight examples of green lifestyles, including a totally off grid home, using recycled building materials, hot water heating, solar and wind energy, and more! Extensive natural gardens will also be on display at some tour stops, with examples of how to create great gardens while conserving water, providing habitat and food for wildlife, and enhancing the environment!

Posted by: Glen: May, 23, 2008

March Update - Snow, Photoshoots and the Return of Sun

We had a huge dump of snow in the last 24 hours. It’s the biggest snowfall in the time that we have lived here. There’s at least three feet of snow in most places and more in the drifts. It took Joanne and I a couple of hours to shovel down to the cars and clear around them. Even so we’re not going anywhere until the driveway gets plowed out.

I love the snow so for me this is great, I’ll be heading off into the bush with my snowshoes following animal tracks and watching for the birds. I love trekking through the parts of the land that are normally too wet and inaccessible in the warmer months.

The week before last we had a camera crew here from an Australian magazine taking pictures of the house. So we had Gil take some pictures of them while they took pictures of us.

Now that we’ve left the grey grey grey months of November, December, January and February we’re producing lots of power again. Those months are what we usually refer to as the “100 Days of Grey” because the sun rarely makes any substantial appearance. We make a fair bit of power off the wind generator at this time of the year, but we still have to run the gas generator far too often for my tastes. Through the worst parts of December and January we have to run the generator about once per week. By that I mean that we run one full tank of gas through the genset, which lasts for about 7 hours.

Around mid-February the sun starts to make more regular appearances and especially in those brutally cold -20C and -30C days we can do quite well. As we move into March we tend to get both sun and wind - today we’ve been generating about 25A from the solar panels and between 10A and 15A all day from the wind generator. As a result we’ve run the dishwasher, and done five loads of laundry and we’re still making tons of power. We haven’t run the generator in about four weeks.

Posted by: Glen: March, 09, 2008

Canadian House and Home

There’s a feature article about the house (and us) in the May 2006 issue of Canadian House and Home. The magazine has been mailed out to subscribers, but it isn’t on the newstand yet.

The pictures are the best ever taken of the house. So good that both Joanne and I could hardly believe we were looking at pictures of the place we live (it doesn’t look that gorgeous day-to-day believe me - though Gil really is that cute). The article is excellent as well. Very well written, with informative sidebars, and no factual errors (a first).

Posted by: Glen: April, 09, 2006

Living Today for Tomorrow

The Friends of the Frink Centre are hosting a Symposium on Sustainability entitled Living Today For Tomorrow on April 22nd, 2006 at the Frink Centre in Belleville.

I’ll be giving a talk on living off the grid at 2:30pm. Also presenting talks throughout the day are my friends Chris Magwood, Patrick Marcotte, and Stephen Collette.

More information can be found here: www.hpedsb.on.ca/frink

The symposium features speakers, demonstrations and exhibits on sustainable construction, constructed wetlands for waste water treatment, renewable energy, and waste reduction and resource conservation.

Posted by: Glen: March, 28, 2006

National Post

Joanne was interviewed today about life in a Straw Bale house by a lady from the National Post. A photographer came by afterwards. It’s for an article about the OSBBC Straw House Tour. They said the article should appear in the Real-Estate section next week - Thursday was mentioned.

Posted by: Glen: September, 20, 2005

OSBBC Straw House Tour

The 3rd Annual OSBBC Straw House Tour is Saturday October 1st, 2005. We will not be on it this year. Joanne’s due date is October 3rd so I expect that we will either have a newborn in the house (Sokolowski’s tend towards the early), or we will be driving up and down the bumpiest roads we can find (as far as Joanne is concerned any day now would be just fine).

If you were counting on coming by and seeing the place I apologize, we’ll be back in 2006.

Posted by: Glen: September, 20, 2005

Costruire

We’re in the latest issue of the Italian Architecture magazine Costruire. I have a copy of the magazine and it is gorgeous, but unfortunately I don’t read a word of Italian.

German book, Italian magazine, does this mean we’re world famous?

Posted by: Glen: September, 20, 2005

Resource Conference

I’ll be speaking this Saturday at the Trent Hills Resource Conference. Look for me 10:30am on Saturday Sept 17, 2005. I’ll be talking about designing and building your own house, what’s involved, what to expect, what you’ll never be able to expect, with my home as a template.

Posted by: Glen: September, 14, 2005

More Press

We’re in the lastest issue of Canadian Homes and Cottages: a nice article with some good pictures.

We’re also in the latest issue of the Italian architecture magazine Construire - in Italian, so I’ve only read various translations, it’s very technical, not really interested in us, just the house.

Posted by: Glen: September, 04, 2005