The first time I saw Rob Dumont’s house I was unimpressed. I was visiting an ex-girlfriend in Saskatoon, I mentioned that I was doing some research into sustainable homes, and she said “there’s one near here, we should walk by it.” It just looked like any other house. The Dumont house is in the colonial revival style, it’s simply built and doesn’t stand out in the neighbourhood, which has a suburban feel to it (though it’s not far from the downtown). I’m used to seeing half million dollar ecohomes, so when you take away the architect and expensive finishes, solariums,
Continue readingAuthor: Mike Henry
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
Continue readingSlideshow of natural finish plasters
More earth and lime finish plasters at naturalplaster.ca
Continue readingBiophilic 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
Continue readingHarold 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
Continue readingPlaster 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
Continue readingWill 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
Continue readingVideo of leveling earth plaster with a darby
Trever Miller from Evolve Builders came out and helped us with some plastering. I asked him to bring his darby (a three foot long leveling trowel) to help us level the kitchen wall behind the cabinets. Trever has years of experience leveling walls with a darby, I filmed this video of him at work.
Continue reading