The BEST way to build a new home? Building a House with STRAW BALES : Start to Finish - Episode 1

Is building a new house with straw bales the best way to build a new home? Straw Bale Construction has been around for over a hundred years, and so few people are aware of its incredible potential. We hope to change that. Join us every Monday at 8 p.m. EST for our new series, "Building a House with Straw Bales: Start to Finish".Heirloom Builders is a straw bale home builder in North Carolina.What’s the difference between a Straw Bale Home and a Conventional Stick-Built Home? What’s up, everybody! Welcome to our series on BUILDING A HOUSE with Straw Bales- Start to Finish. THIS is Heirloom Builders. And I’m Logan Parker. I’ve been building energy efficient homes and custom cabinetry for the last 16 years. And I absolutely LOVE geeking out on all the details that make a home not only look good, but also function really well. Have you ever heard the story of the 3 Little Pigs??? The LAZY little pig built HIS house out of straw……….and that didn’t work out so well for him. The big bad wolf Huffed and Puffed and blew his house down. But the hard-working little pig took the time to build himself a BRICK house. And no matter how much that big bad wolf tried, he couldn’t blow down THAT little pig’s brick house. So why would anyone want to build their home with straw bales? a STRAW BALE HOME is built with 18” wide compressed straw bales, with 1” of plaster on both the inside and outside surfaces. It’s actually built more like the little pig’s BRICK house. And yet with the dense straw bale core, it’s SUPER insulated and Cozy WARM inside.Have you ever thought about building your own home? Built well enough to hold the heat in the winter and be comfortable in the hot summer months? Most homes are built with 2x4 walls and fiberglass batt insulation. The main problem with this strategy is that you can only fit so much insulation in a skinny little wall. And if it’s not installed properly, it’s hardly effective at all. 30% of home energy loss comes from air leakage, and when you quickly stuff fiberglass batts into a 2x4 wall, like most contractors do, there’s tons of gaps and places for cold air to leak inside your home. Building better homes that off-gas fewer VOC’s, consume less energy over their lifetime, and take less energy to build in the first place is a GREAT start. There are a LOT of ways to build a better home. But None of them offer as much promise as straw bale building. I’ve been intrigued by building with straw bales ever since I learned that they could make a super-insulated wall system, look really beautiful, AND using natural materials could be a way to build a house for dirt cheap. We’ve built all kinds of high performance conventional homes with insulation details that perform really well. I love geeking out on how to build things better. We built an air-tight home to the rigorous Passivhuas requirement of less than 0.5 ACH. We even built the first panelized HEMPCRETE home in North America.And yet Nothing excites me more, than building with straw bales. In fact, I built my own house with straw bales. I can attest to the strength, the thermal mass, and the amazing insulation value that keeps me cool in the summer and warm in the winter. Straw bales are basically rectangular BRICKS OF INSULATION that you can stack to make a wall and literally just smear them with mud to create a superior wall system. Think about it, these are about the closest thing to legos that you can use to build your home, except even better. Like LEGO’s, straw bales are lightweight and easy to move. Yet they are BIG, so stacking a whole house can easily be done in a single weekend with help from a few friends. Stack the bales like bricks in a running bond where they overlap on each successive course. We use a chainsaw to notch out space in the bale for the framing - so it’s all flush on the outside. Then all we gotta do is apply an earthen clay or lime plaster for BOTH the interior and exterior surfaces. We smear it directly on the bales to seal them up and protect from rain, pests and fire. One of the most promising things about straw bale construction is that straw bales are readily available all over the planet. I feel like every week I see a new type of “ingenious” 3D printed technology or lego style house building kit that's hoping to replace conventional building with ease and labor savings. But here’s the thing: We don’t have to reinvent the wheel here folks. Straw bales are a waste product that can be repurposed into something really practical. They are imperfect, yes. Do they require manual labor? Definitely! But in the age of sky-high lumber prices and robots replacing our jobs, we NEED manual labor opportunities AND simple ways for everyday folks living on Basic Income to build a decent home with their own two hands.