Browse Forums Building A New House Re: Thudd's cold climate strawbale eco build 21Oct 19, 2009 12:18 pm It didn't take long before we realised that the house would have to be multi-storey. We knew from the beginning that we'd have a garage on the bottom floor excavated into the hill, with the main floor on top of that. We also would have liked to have the garage entry on the 'side' of the house so that the garage door(s) wouldn't be visible from the street. It soon became clear though that with having only about 15m width to work with (taking into account setbacks, a drainage easement, eaves, etc) we didn't have room to curve a driveway around to the side of the house, and we would have to build up. Building up isn't such a bad thing in many ways. It makes the footprint on the ground of the house smaller and expensive things like roofs can be smaller, whereas additional straw for higher walls is extremely cheap. It also meant we had to find room for the stairs! As part of our design we wanted to get full benefit from any SHW or PV panels, which meant that the ideal pitch for the roof was around 40 degrees or more. So if we pitched the roof at 45 degrees, gee, that creates a lot of space under the roof doesn't it.... And indeed it does! So the second floor is actually completely within the roof space, so we in effect gain almost extra floor of space without actually building the house higher. Not bad, hey? Who said being green was all about compromise? Re: Thudd's cold climate strawbale eco build 22Oct 19, 2009 12:32 pm Jodie80 Only one quick question tho. Whats the issue with the Gunns timber?? (i've actually never heard of it LOL) Simple, really. Gunns is a company with a litany and history of environmental vandalism, corporate thuggery, political bribery, and business practices that are at best unethical and immoral and at worst illegal. They support clearfelling of native forests to produce woodchips, 1080 poisoning of native wildlife, they have sued people who have criticised the company, cozied up to and bullied the government so much that they had special legislation passed for them so that they could get project approvals without public scrutiny or requiring they adhere to the planning process required of everyone else, maintain predatory tactics to force smaller operators out of the market ... I could go on but this isn't the forum, suffice to say I consider them an evil, morally bankrupt company and refuse to support them or their subsidiaries in any way. Re: Thudd's cold climate strawbale eco build 23Oct 26, 2009 2:49 pm Scrounging One of the advantages of not going with a mass project builder is that we've got total say over what goes into the house - we don't have to put up with cheap rubbish fittings and paying an exorbitant upgrade fee to get slightly less cheap rubbish, and we have free reign over materials. We can go shopping for whatever our heart desires to put into the house. This has the potential drawback of the finish & fitout becoming a money pit by going overboard with everything, whereas at least the lack of choice from project builders means you know [roughly] what you're in for. The big positive is the ability to save big wads of cash if you're diligent! And with a custom build, saving even more money by taking non-building tasks away from the builder. So, with me being the type to go out of my way if it means a good deal here is some of the stuff I've been stockpiling for the build. Re: Thudd's cold climate strawbale eco build 24Oct 26, 2009 3:20 pm Floorboards Before moving interstate from W.A. we renovated a house there. For an additional room we wanted to match the existing jarrah floorboards and I found a place that sells packs of boards salvaged from demolished houses. I dug through their warehouse with a measuring tape and found a pack that matched the existing boards in size and finish. At the end of the job you couldn't tell the difference between old and new! Fast forward to not so long ago where we were discussing our interstate move and what we'd build when we got here. I figured that since we were bringing about one and a half container loads of our stuff over with us then why couldn't we use that container space for something interesting... ... so I revisited the floorboard recyclers and, based on our rough ideas of what we'd build, bought about 100sqm of recycled jarrah floorboards. At a fraction of the cost of new ones, plus the great look that old jarrah has when it is polished up, I reckon it was a no-brainer. Sure, it was a right pain unpacking all the boards on arrival and stacking them up in our temp place, and it'll be even more painful unstacking and loading them onto a truck to take them to the building site and unpacking and stacking again. But at the end of the day we'll have a house full of that wonderful dark red jarrah boards (which is also not a common timber here so there is a uniqueness factor as well) but it will have cost as a whole bunch less. And re-using a precious resource to boot! Re: Thudd's cold climate strawbale eco build 25Oct 26, 2009 3:35 pm Don't think I stopped at floorboards either. During our travels around Perth we came across one of the tile shops that has a discount warehouse attached. In this discount warehouse they put all the stuff they want to get rid of - discontinued stock, end-of-line, oddments, leftovers, misorders, etc. These aren't cheapies mind you, they're the exact same tiles the shop sells in their main showroom. So while you wouldn't have a great range to choose from if you were trying to tile and entire house, when you're just doing individual rooms or small features it's ideal. So instead of paying $40 or $50 per sqm or more for their flashy Italian tiles, you can pick them up, as we did, for around $10 per sqm. Border tiles were a couple of bucks each. The movers probably thought we were a bunch of nutters moving floorboards and tiles across the country, but consider: we bought all the tiles for the bathroom (including shower enclosure), laundry, toilet, kitchen wall, and entry room, for just over $500. And reiterating, these weren't Asian cheapies but the proper Italian & Spanish jobbies. Re: Thudd's cold climate strawbale eco build 26Oct 26, 2009 3:49 pm Bathroom sinks @ auction A few weeks back there was a local auction for bathroom cabinets and whatnot from a supplier that had gone under. Figuring it was worth a look, I went along. It turns out that there wasn't anything there that took my fancy so I left and spent the day doing other stuff. Later that day I had an idea for how I could use a couple of other non-bathroom bits in the auction so with my wife in tow I went back. I was too late and the items in question sold for more than I would have been willing to pay for them anyway. But my wife had a wander around anyway and spotted a striking bathroom sink, one of the bowl types that you mount on top of a vanity. I had also spotted it when I was first out there but there was only one of them and we were doing a double vanity setup in our bathroom. She was curious as to how much it sold for so she asked the auctioneers. "One of them sold for $75," she was told. One of them? My ears pricked up and I asked if there were more. There were indeed more, four in total I think, and they asked if we wanted them. For that price sure we were! They are this wicked thick black glass with a red/yellow/orange mosaic pattern inside the bowl, it probably sounds horrid described like that but in person they look pretty good. So for the princely sum of $150 we picked up a pair of highly interesting new bathroom sinks. Re: Thudd's cold climate strawbale eco build 27Oct 27, 2009 1:54 pm Timber! Not long back there was an auction at a timber yard that included lots of assorted native timbers (note: this was from a sawmill that runs managed forests and doesn't clear-fell, and these were the leftovers that were being sold). I was originally thinking of hoping to pick up some posts that had advertised that I could cut up to use as stringers in our stairs, and maybe even get the timber for the stairs. When we arrived we watched in disbelief as the first few lots, which were large myrtle and blackwood slabs, go for ludicrously cheap prices. Maybe it was because the sawmill was a regional one rather than being close to the city and more people didn't show up, I don't know. But my wife and I then started frantically going through the catalogue looking for anything else that we might be able to use. And did we find some stuff... By the end of the day we had scored:
We were rapt - we're going to have a solid sassafras kitchen which will look absolutely wicked, for considerably less than the cost of a flat pack melamine kitchen. Celery top stairs, sassie shelving, myrtle benchtops, it'll be like a showcase of timber in there. And it was all salvaged timber which would otherwise go to waste. So now my garage & shed looks like a lumber yard with timber and floorboards stacked everywhere. It'll be a pain to shift it all up to the building site, but then I just have to think of how much (or rather, how little!) I scored it all for. Re: Thudd's cold climate strawbale eco build 28Oct 27, 2009 2:30 pm And because everybody loves plans, here are our current plans - but likely subject to change which I will explain further on. Bottom floor: garage and storage. We've gone for two separate doors for a more 'stable door' look. They will be arched on top to add to the effect. The wine cellar will be built from strawbale so it should be incredible stable in temperature. Retaining wall running behind the cellar will be built from rock-filled gabions - cheap, sturdy, low impact. I've made sure there's plenty of storage and room for a nice sized workbench. The computer room is more like an 'server/electrical' room, and will contain things like my computer rack holding servers, switches, patchbays, and the like, and other electrical items like the PV and wind turbine inverters and controllers, and other assorted panels. Hot air from the room will be able to be vented outside during the summer then diverted to vent into the house during winter for additional heating. Like ⋅ Add a comment ⋅ Pin to Ideaboard ⋅ Re: Thudd's cold climate strawbale eco build 29Oct 27, 2009 2:45 pm Ground floor Lots of features/ideas here to talk about. Entry vestibule on the right provides an airlock/mudroom entry from both the front and internally from the garage. The 'shelving' on the left of the vestibule should actually be on the other side of the wall (ie, facing into the vestibule, not the dining room) to provide storage for shoes etc neatly recessed into the wall. Walls are half metre thick incidentally. Bed 1 nice and big with a whole wall of floor-to-ceiling robes. Passageway has internal mudbrick walls, both as a feature and to provide more internal mass. Dining room & bedroom look out over the valley and city, with a balcony for the dining room. The windows come down to 600mm from the floor, which is a nice height to make window seats (put your hand up if you've never seen windows in a strawbale house before and I'll post some pics). I oriented the kitchen off at an angle for a few reasons: one, to provide some interest to the house so it isn't just a rectangle; two, to sneak extra kitchen and bench space as my wife & I are both keen cooks and make heavy use of our kitchens; three, to point it directly at the early morning sun, particularly in winter. External bathroom wall is made entirely of glass bricks set in an arc. My aim is to put a nice oval bath into the curve formed by the glass. Laundry provides another airlock out to the rear of the house. All the floors of the north side of the house (the hatched areas, plus bed 2) will be earthen floors to catch the sun as it comes in through all those northern windows. Eaves are approx 750mm all around. (Why do people insist on building houses without eaves in our climate, then wonder why their cooling bills are so high in summer? Perth people, I'm looking at you here) Windows will be all double-glazed, with the south windows (bottom of the plans) being additionally low-e and argon filled. uPVC frames all around with all windows either being or containing a section of tilt-and-turn. Like ⋅ Add a comment ⋅ Pin to Ideaboard ⋅ Re: Thudd's cold climate strawbale eco build - now with plans! 30Oct 27, 2009 3:00 pm Top floor - contained within the roof space The roof is pitched at 43 degrees so there's lots of space under it which we're going to use. Our lounge room/my cinema room goes upstairs. With strawbale walls all around acoustic performance and soundproofing will be extremely good; in fact there are a number of strawbale recording studios popping up around the world as the performance of the material becomes recognised; here are but a couple: http://www.sunpowerstudios.com.au/ http://www.alteredstaterecords.com/strawbalestudio.html Not only that but as the walls angle in as they hit the roof (it is a 'tent room' remember) reflections and echoes are broken up further providing further acoustic improvement. Off to the back of the room is a small cupboard where my A/V equipment will be stored with access to the front of the gear via the lounge and access to the back for cabling and maintenance via the door off the foyer. Unfortunately the dormer doesn't provide enough window area to satisfy the building code, even though I don't actually want additional natural light. So I have had to put in a skylight above the foyer and use some of the light from there into the lounge. Sucks, but the building code hasn't kept up with the requirements for these types of rooms and in fact specifically includes them as living space. Sure, you can block the windows out but that's a waste when you don't want them in there in the first place! Also, there is no rear dormer on the lounge because I want the space on the north roof side for PV panels and a second SHW panel. Beds 3 & 4, well, we don't actually need these rooms but the space is there and it is just a matter of whacking some walls up to create rooms, so why not? One will be used as a study, although how much work will get done there with the magnificent view out of the dormer remains to be seen! Like ⋅ Add a comment ⋅ Pin to Ideaboard ⋅ Re: Thudd's cold climate strawbale eco build - now with plans! 31Oct 27, 2009 5:03 pm Thanks for putting all this information here Thudd. I really like your house design and if you can build this house for 250K, then I'd like to know your builder's name for future reference. We used to live in a house with the upstairs kneewall/dormer setup like yours. The biggest problem we had with it was heat in the upstairs rooms in the summer. Since those rooms are right under the roof and because their volume is lower than normal (because of the kneewall and the sloping roof), they get very hot on hot days. Insulation doesn't solve this problem. We lived in a cold part of the U.S. where it was often below freezing all of January and in the 30's in summer - and our house was very well insulated with double-glazed windows. But the upstairs rooms still got extremely hot in summer. This was made worse by the fact that there was no real path for flow-through ventilation upstairs. Your house will be helped by the strawbale walls, but most of the surface area of the upstairs rooms is roof (or kneewall leading to roof) rather than strawbale. If this were my design, I would seriously think about putting a window on the east wall upstairs that can be opened to allow better flow-through ventilation in summer. This would also allow you to forgo the skylight and you could use blackout curtains to darken the room. You probably have good reasons why you have no window there, but after years of sweating in my upstairs rooms, trust me - they're going to be hot in summer. These kinds of houses are fairly common in the U.S. - where they are referred to as "one and a half story" houses. Typically, they have ridge vents along the top of the roof, vents in the roof, vents in the eaves and often also temperature regulated attic fans to keep the heat in the smaller than normal roof space down and therefore to keep the upstairs rooms cooler. Our house was old and only had the eaves vents and a few roof vents - which was not really enough. So you might want to think about what you can add to help with this problem. The other "problem" we had with ours was the height of the kneewalls. Ours were about a metre high - which meant that we were forever banging our heads on the ceiling when wandering near the edges of the room. No matter how careful you are, this will happen if the kneewalls aren't high enough. Hopefully you won't have this problem. Keep the info on your build coming... Re: Thudd's cold climate strawbale eco build - now with plans! 32Oct 28, 2009 12:59 pm I was initially concerned about the 'head bashing' issue, so I brought the interior walls in enough so that the wall doesn't start sloping in until about 1.9m high. Which also means that there won't be much 'roof as wall' and what there will be will be heavily insulated. Plus summer days rarely reach 30 degrees here, and with a few other things we're planning to do overheating shouldn't be an issue except for maybe 2-3 days a year, and that's when we'd be sitting on the balcony with long cool drinks anyway! There's no window on the east wall because that will be the projector screen wall. Re: Thudd's cold climate strawbale eco build - now with plans! 33Oct 28, 2009 1:41 pm Wow Thudd, your home is going to be amazing. It's incredible what you have found to build your house. You will have so much more satisfaction once you see it standing there than most other people because you played such a huge roll in it all and because it has personal meaning to you. Good luck, hope you find more bargains to help you along the way! Re: Thudd's cold climate strawbale eco build - now with plans! 34Nov 26, 2009 2:42 pm Update time We've finalised the plans and made a few changes from what I posted earlier. In a nutshell, we sat down at the end and looked at the plans with a critical eye and said "Is this what we really need?" And in the cold harsh light of day we did a bit of surgery to the plans.
We did this for a couple of reasons. Firstly and most obviously is cost. There is a saying in building that if you want to build cheaper then build smaller. And by taking off that top floor we scythe about $50k off the total cost by our reckoning, once you take into account the cost of building three nice dormers, fitting out the space in the roof, building the stairs, and so on. Fifty thousand dollars isn't small change in anyone's measure; it is $3500 extra a year in interest (more if rates go up, as they will) plus another 5 years of repayments. Secondly, it becomes a smaller house and requires less resources to build. It is easy to get carried away when designing a house and letting your imagination go wild but when the whole point is to build something sustainable then it is a bit hypocritical to go and build something bigger than we need. So for our own conscience we had to cut it down otherwise all our talk about sustainability and green living is just that, talk. It also becomes easier to build - simply by dropping the roof pitch by seven degrees we lop nearly a metre and a half off the height of the house. Less materials, less time, less scaffolding, etc etc. It has necessitated some compromises though. The lounge is a bit smaller than I would have liked, and the A/V cupboard now shares the space with the computer room behind it. This might raise some noise issues with the computer gear that will be in the room so I will have to be careful about that; the original lounge was quite deliberately placed as far away from the computer room as possible for that very reason. Secondly, I can no longer utilise ceiling space for my infinite baffle subwoofers, and now have to mount them in the 'front' wall of the lounge. If you've no idea what I'm talking about then all will become clear in time! On the plus side, as part of the deal I get to put a better class of projector into the room! Also, the stairs were going to be a bit of a feature in the house, with a small inside garden & water feature in the space under the upper flight. That is obviously no longer going to be there which saddens me a little, but then I just have to think of the $3-4k I won't be paying the bank each year. Ultimately though the main living space of the house won't change so I think that sensibly we've done the right thing and we won't be thinking in ten years time "gee, why didn't we spend the extra money at the time". It's one thing to scrimp on a grand here and there, 'scrimping' on fifty grand is another matter altogether. So while in an ideal world we still love our original idea I think the lifestyle improvements we'll get out of it (ie, many more dollars back in our pocket!) totally outweigh the "wouldn't it be nice if..." factor. Re: Thudd's cold climate strawbale eco build - now with plans! 35Nov 26, 2009 10:32 pm Your house sounds amazing, even with the changes. I LOVE sassafras! How wonderful to be able to build with it and not just have a few little vases and bowls! And the huon burl, wow! Re: Thudd's cold climate strawbale eco build - now with plans! 38Dec 02, 2009 2:06 pm One thing you might want to consider is designing the house so that you could make the attic space into living area in the future if you want to. If your house is wide enough, the main thing you would need to do is have the roof trusses/framing built to allow for this - so it might not be too expensive. The chance to add the extra space in the future may be worth a little extra cost now if that's what you really want. Re: Thudd's cold climate strawbale eco build - now with plans! 39Dec 02, 2009 2:45 pm We ended up changing the plans specifically not to use the attic space - we decided that we didn't need it, it was extravagant, and was just going to soak up money for no purpose. For sure we'll make sure it can be used as a storage space, but I don't envisage it ever turning into living space. Re: Thudd's cold climate strawbale eco build - now with plans! 40Jan 07, 2010 10:32 am What a busy december! Our planning application is in, submitted just before christmas. The paperwork is unbelievable, it seems everybody from the paper boy to the mayor needs their own copies. We've already received a reply back asking for more info about the proposed driveway (fair enough I suppose) but all up they were quite impressed with our proposal and I don't think we'll have any major problems having it go through. We have also been flat out chasing up quotations for various bits and pieces so that we can get an application in to the bank. Lighting, electrics, heating, plumbing, etc etc - all the stuff that the builder would subcontract out. Harvest is in a couple of weeks which means we'll be going around picking out our bales soon! We are already getting some amusement when we spot a farm shed full of straw and say "there's our house". Depends how much direct sun it gets. Is there any shading (eaves or trees)? If the sun hits a window directly it doesn't matter too much if it's double or single… 1 12670 Hi guys, I want to butt a concrete vegetable garden bed against a concrete build up of a carport. It will be a 700mm high wall about 120mm thick and I will run a 12mm rio… 0 2615 9 24814 |