The Straw House Blog

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

An update in pictures and numbers

Ceara’s 13. She just got groomed. The groomer went a bit nuts with the sheers. Ceara is not impressed.

Gil’s nearly two and a half. He likes to help me build things. He helps by moving all the tools around.

Declan is 6 months old. This is his first meal of “solid” food. Not bad for flavourless mush.

We installed four more solar panels this winter. They doubled our production to 1.3KW. Life is good.

The first two of possibly five decks to be built this year.

 

Posted by: Glen

April, 02, 2006

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

Another Straw House Blog

There are lots of blogs out there now about straw bale (and other) homes, but we met Kara and Dave a while ago when they passed through Ontario on vacation. I’m excited that they’ve started construction on their own home, you can watch their progress on their blog.

     

Posted by: Glen

June, 22, 2006

Update - December 2007

I’ve gone back to Movable Type. The WordPress experiment was a disaster. Not only did I not like WordPress but it had been so long since I last posted that I had forgotten all of my login information. At least with MT you don’t have to be a programmer to modify the templates.

There’s no navigation yet so until I get that built here are links to the house page and the lights page. On the house page you’ll find information about the house and passive solar design as well as a list of books that we recommend. The lights page includes information about the line of LED lights that I build, including most importantly where you can buy them.

Posted by: Glen

December, 09, 2007

The Driveway

Most people when they come to visit remark upon the length of our driveway. Because the front 30 acres of our land is part of the Oak Ridges Moraine we couldn’t build the house anywhere near the road. As a result the house is near the centre of the land and our driveway is nearly a kilometre long. The quality of the road varies seasonally: muddy and wet during the spring, dry and dusty during the summer, rough in the fall and not surprisingly, slippery in the winter.

Our driveway is plowed in the winter rather than blown. Now here in the country the snowblower vs. plow debate can be nearly religious in its tone and fervour but I personally prefer plowing because it builds up big drifts at the side of the fields which can act like crude snow fences. Our neighbour has a driveway nearly as long as ours and a snowblower and he has constant problems with the snow blowing right back over his lane within days of blowing it clear. The drawback to plowing is that in years with heavy snowfalls the driveway can get progressively narrower as you run out of room to put the snow. We’ve already had problems up where we park the cars where the piles are encroaching on our parking spaces. We pay about $300 a year for plowing for an average of twelve visits. This year we’re already at six so I’m expecting the bill will be higher.

The big problem this year is the ice. We’ve had ice storms before but the ice usually only lasts a day or two and melts or is covered by snow. Our driveway has been covered by ice for it’s whole length for several weeks now. The ice is so thick and so complete that I’ve been tempted to strap on my skates and try and skate the whole thing. The ice is causing us big problems with cars as you can well imagine. We park on a slope and on several occassions we haven’t been able to negotiate the hill. Backing down the hill is… exciting. Joanne has stuck her car in snowbanks twice - once so bad that I had to winch it out - I buried the truck so thoroughly that it looked like I had parallel parked it into a snowbank and my parents spent the better part of an hour trapped in the driveway on Christmas day. We can’t leave the cars at the bottom of the hill because there isn’t enough room to turn them around down there. So every day I go out with the ash tray and spread out the meagre ashes from the wood stove. We can’t get back to the pit and I’m loathe to spend the money on sanding (and I can’t get back to my pit) so we’ll just wait and hope that we get some snow soon.

 

Posted by: Glen

December, 30, 2007

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

Throwing blades

We went out this morning to play in the snow (more on that later) and we could hear a strange rattling noise. Things are usually pretty quiet around our house and the sound was coming from the north, which is very unusual because there is nothing but fields behind us for quite a distance. It turns out that the strange noise was coming from our wind generator which had thrown two blades sometime early this morning.

I’m not sure how this happened as it wasn’t particularly windy or cold or this morning. When I got up around 6am we were producing around 10A of power from the wind generator so I can only assume that it still had three blades.

Anyway I tripped the brake on the wind genny charge controller which slowed it somewhat then climbed the back hill to trip the main brake which is located in a sealed box at the base of the tower. That brake shorts out the leads and causes the turbine to stop.

Once that was done I set about looking for the thrown blades. I found one quite near the base of the tower but the other is missing. Depending on how fast the turbine was spinning and what direction it was facing the blade could be very far away.

The biggest problem for us is that we make the bulk of our wind power in the spring. In fact we’ve had such a wonderful confluence of wind and sun for the last month and a half that we haven’t run the generator in ages. There’s so much snow in the back fields that it’ll be quite a while before we can get a truck up to the hill to lower the tower. Not to mention that the gin-pole is buried under nearly two feet of snow.

     

Posted by: Glen

March, 21, 2008

Tobogganing

The tobogganing conditions the last couple of weeks have been stellar. We have 2’ of hard pack snow than runs smooth down the back hills and almost right to the house. Conditions are best in the morning after a good cold night when the crust is still frozen. By mid-afternoon this crust is slushy and the hills are slower.

This is the view from the top.

Of course to get there you have quite a walk ahead of you.

Savour the view for a few minutes, catch your breath and then it’s time to come down.

The run from the top is too long and steep for the kids to do themselves but there is a nice hill about half way that Gil can handle on his own. The longest runs are around 300m. We toboggan from the back property line almost all the way to the house for our final run.

Though sometimes speed gets the better of you and you and the GT part company.

Declan thinks that a soother counts as protective headgear.

     

Posted by: Glen

March, 29, 2008

Building a Holtzapffel Bench

I determined some time ago, not long after building the coffee table in fact, that my ability to draw interesting furniture designs exceeded my woodworking skills. I also felt that it would be something of a tragedy to spend all of this time cutting and milling lumber only to wreck the boards due to my incompetence.

In January I took an an introduction to hand tool techniques course at the Rosewood Studio woodworking school. There I learned that:

1. Most of my hand tools tools were shit
2. I had a lot to learn
3. I was going to need a proper wookbench

So I bought a few books about workbenches and started scouring the internet for information. The writer of the best of the workbench books is a fellow by the name of Christopher Schwarz. He’s the editor of Popular Woodworking magazine and Woodworking magazine (excellent if you are a hand tools enthusiast) and he knows more about traditional woodworking benches than anybody I know. Of the three bench types that he has written about I decided to build a Holtzapffel Bench. No, I have no idea how to pronounce it either.

The first step was acquiring the wood. We have plenty of 1” ash that’s already been through the kiln but I suspected that Joanne might take issue with wood that supposed to be used for the ceiling going towards a workbench. Unfortunately most of our wood has been milled 5/4 (~1”) which would require a lot of gluing. So I bought some 8/4 (~2”) ash from the fellow who rents us kiln space.

After it came out of the kiln we took it up to dad’s place so that we could dimension the lumber. Here’s the rough lumber ready to be cut up.

The idea here is that by rough cutting your pieces before jointing/planing you can save a fair bit of time and wood (thickness mostly). So as I cut out the rough chunks I carried them into the garage where Dad was running the big machines.

It took us a good portion of yesterday and all of today but we’ve got all of the wood for the whole bench ready to be glued up. I’ll pop up there a couple of nights this week and hopefully we can be ready to start building the base next weekend. The picture below shows the boards for the top laid out as they will be glued up. The darker coloured board is piece of Black Cherry from my land that Dad had in his garage and we have a lovely spalted maple board to use on the front of the bench top.

 

Posted by: Glen

April, 06, 2008