The Sustainable Home

Maintenance and repair of natural plasters

When spaghetti sauce meets unsealed earth plaster, it’s a bad scene. But it’s fixable. Most bad things that happen to natural plasters are repairable. There tends to be a trade off between durability and repairability – an unsealed earth plaster is the easiest plaster to damage, and also the easiest to repair without a trace. Lime plasters can be a little harder, but there are definitely tricks for repairing them. Also the more polished and perfect a plaster is the harder it is to blend in a repair; if there is very little variation in your surface, any blemish is

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Biophilic design

At the first stop on a ferry trip down the Alaskan coast, I scrambled up a steep slope through a hemlock forest and my nose came close to the mossy carpet. the smell that greeted me was rich, earthy, it reminded me of a stout beer. I sat down, my back to a tree; a varied thrush sang its long human-sounding whistled notes in the distance. My eyes ran over the green carpet that covered every surface, following the contours of logs and roots, and climbing the lower trunks of trees. Feather moss, fern moss, lanky moss, cat-tail moss, electrified

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Harold Orr’s Superinsulated Retrofits

Recently I had the privilege of interviewing Harold Orr, who was the project leader on the Saskatchewan Conservation House in the late 1970’s. He was involved in the invention of the residential HRV, and blower door tests, and his work influenced the Passive House and Net Zero movements. Now in his eighties, his brain contains a library of information on energy efficient building, and he talked to me for two hours straight. Orr’s main passion for the past several decades has been superinsulated retrofits of existing buildings, and he says the need for deep energy retrofits was obvious to him

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Plaster Workshops 2014

2015 Workshops will be posted soon. Enter your email (on the right) to be notified. Earth and lime plasters for natural buildings  June 21-22, 2014Earth is an ideal material for plastering natural buildings. Its permeability prevents moisture issues, it is relatively easy and safe to apply, and beautiful. For exterior application earth can be used in combination with lime.Our next plaster workshop is scheduled for June 21 and 22 (2014), participants may choose to come for one or both days.This workshop will take place on a small hobby farm in southern Quebec. On the first day (June 21) participants will

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Will straw bale buildings last?

After seeing problems in a few straw bale buildings, I’ve been thinking about this lately: is it a truly durable building system? By which I mean, will  a straw bale house measure its lifespan in centuries rather than decades? I’ve concluded that most will, some won’t. The ones that won’t are predictable, however, and for the most part they break the rules. Architects occasionally design straw bale homes with no roof overhang, for instance. I’ve seen this twice, and in both cases an overhang was added before construction was completed. In one of them there were already some moisture issues

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Window shaping in straw bale homes: a how-to and slideshow

Window curves are one of the most distinctive features in straw bale homes, and are often a big consideration in the choice to go with straw bale over other forms of construction. But information on how to shape curves is sparse, so I thought I’d share some of what we’ve learned over years of doing bale work. The first thing you really need to think about is radius of curve. To visualize this take a string nine inches in length, pin it at one end and attach a pencil to the far end. Now draw a quarter of a circle

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