What a first couple of days! After the excitement of getting the bales to site, it has been a whirlwind of learning and re-learning to get our first wall installed. We are learning that many of our bales are a bit soft and/or the strings aren't quite centered, so we have spent a lot of time retying the bales. This is very time consuming and can be frustrating, but it definitely gives us plenty of opportunity to learn the knots that we need to know for resizing bales, as needed. Our straw bale expert, Andrew Morrison, spent the better part of Monday morning teaching us his special straw bale knot and tying process, which includes tossing your body weight on top of the bale to kind of hump them tighter. It is amazing how much of a difference this makes from a starting bale to a tightened, retied bale. Once bales are retied, we notch them as needed to fit around our existing beams, and stacking them in a running bond (similar to tile or brick) to provide strength. When we have a full wall in place, we use tampers to get the bales positioned correctly so that they aren't sticking out on either side. We then use weed whips (or whatever similar term you want to use) to get them flush with our beams and framing. Tomorrow, we will be attaching felt and mesh to prepare for future plastering. The first wall on the first floor is now ready for this next step! If we ever build a straw bale house again (who knows!), we will definitely be pickier with our bales and check the strings a bit closer. We should be able to make these work, but it is going to take us quite a bit longer. With that in mind: we have already added an extra week to our build to cover the extra time that we will need, given what we have learned in these first few days. So if you are interested, please come join us and help! It has been great to meet and work with so many different people who want to learn about straw bale construction. Luckily, many of them have been able to work a couple of shifts. Everyone is welcome for as much or as little time as they have, but training takes a lot of time, so it is great if folks can come back for at least a second shift. This work is tiring and it is definitely time for me to sleep. We hope you can come join us, though!
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Bales have arrived!!! It was a bit of a scramble, but we have great friends and volunteers who rolled with the adjustments.
Our hauler canceled Friday morning while Katie was already on her way to the farm in Frederic, Wisconsin. After a few “animated” calls, she parked the pickup truck er borrowed and ended up renting a 24’ U-haul and getting to the farm to haul herself. Luckily, the hauling company felt bad and found two other drivers in smaller trucks, so we had three batches of bales. Good news was our official moisture test from Braun Intertec passed with flying colors! 18% is the general threshold to avoid mold issues. All of our bales have been stored in a barn for a few months, so this wasn’t a huge risk, but they can back between 9-12%, which is great! Added bonus: drier bales are also lighter, which came in handy when throwing them up to the second floor. Each bale weighed between 35-45 pounds, so it was quite the workout! Also, 650 is a lot of bales! And they shed a bit. Luckily, Katie built in some spoilage, so we should be good. We swept up the shed straw and put it back in the uhaul, which I had to late night deliver back to Wisconsin so we could grab the pickup truck and get our other tools from the @minnesotatoollibrary yesterday. Did you know that we have a couple of tool library locations where you can check out tools? Everything from weed whips to chainsaws, cement mixers, tool belts, wheelbarrows, etc. They are awesome and you should check it out! Big shout out to @brinkwatts @sunnyrae214 @brian.christopher.thompson @bexswanson @jonocowgill @dreamofthe90sinstpaul @morganbird @james.k.bohn @wedgelive and a couple others not on IG for helping us get this project off on the right foot! Bales are now stacked, with about ⅔ in the house and ⅓ on pallets and covered in tarps in the driveway. We will moisture test them again on Monday morning to be safe, but we should be good to go! There is still time to join us for our build! We have volunteer opportunities all week for you to try your hand at straw bale construction with plenty of guidance. Sign up to join us. #UptownStrawhouse #Straw We are under two weeks from the start of our straw bale training and build! On Friday October 1st, 650 bales will be arriving on a semi from western Wisconsin in front of our small 1/8 of an acre lot. I have cajoled some friends and volunteers into helping us unload the semi and get the bales stacked and ready for Monday's build start.
Are you interested in getting hands on experience with straw bale construction and helping us with our wall assembly? From October 4 (Monday) through roughly October 10 (Sunday), we will be working with community members, volunteers, and friends to assemble all of our walls and getting on the first coat of plaster. Come join us! We have weekday shifts from 8am-11:30am, 12pm-3pm, and 3pm-6pm. Saturday and Sunday we will be working from 8:30-12:30pm and 1pm-5:30pm. Lunch and snacks provided! We have all the tools you will need (maybe bring your own gloves, if you prefer) and will teach you everything that you need, depending on your interest. Sign up to volunteer here and tell your friends! Peter here. It has been an exciting few weeks of construction on site. As you saw in our last post, Katie got her hands dirty (or rather, boots) in helping with the foundation pour. Since then, the framing for the first and second floors has gone up! Straw bale framing for our project is a bit different than what you would see in a traditional stick frame. Our posts are 4"x4" and vertical. We don't do the normal cross bracing like in a stick frame because that would make putting in the straw bales an incredible pain in the butt. With just the vertical posts, notching our bales to fit will be much easier. Now you might be thinking to yourself, "But Peter, won't your house topple over without any extra supports?" And you're probably right! The Big Bad Wolf could probably do some damage if we stopped our work there. Our engineers, however, had added in quite a significant amount of "hurricane braces" to ensure that no storm will be knocking this house over. Quick networking shoutout to Tony Poletto and Jeff Anderson at Meyer Borgman Johnson. Tony and Jeff are both accomplished structural engineers who also happen to be my former college ultimate frisbee teammates. Good to be able to work with your friends! I do want to note that there is a tradeoff with the hurricane braces and steel that will be used to reinforce our framing. Part of the goal with the straw bale wall assembly was to use a waste product that can be composted at the end of life. Overall, we were hoping to use less energy. Steel is, unfortunately, very energy intensive to work with and likely undoes some of our carbon gains. We did take some solace, however, that steel is very easy to recycle, where any fossil products that we would have otherwise used for our wall assembly likely wouldn't have been. Back to the framing, you will also notice the pony wall at the base of the first floor. This will be a more "standard" wall and the cavity will be filled with cellulose. This is an extra moisture security measure. Though the plaster should keep our bales dry, we are taking the extra precaution of starting the bales a couple of feet off the ground to make sure that no water gets in, which would be bad for everything. Two nice things about the pony wall, though: we can hide almost all of our electrical wiring for the first floor in this cavity, meaning we can skip some of the bale cutting that we would have otherwise had to do (and we will have to do on the second floor). Second, it provides a great visual for our build blog for how thick our walls will be! Not everyone has a clear mental picture of how thick a two-string straw bale, so this framing makes it easier. In addition to the pony wall, you can see where the window and door framing is taking place. This was another small compromise for us in that we ended up agreeing to use plywood for the framing. We had to find a way to provide enough strength to support the windows to be mounted on the exterior of the framing. We wanted the windows on the outside to again provide extra protection against water pooling anywhere and potentially seeping in. Had the windows been mounted on the inside, where the rest of the beams are, there would have been a sill on the exterior that would have potentially provided an opportunity for water to get in. So, we compromised and used plywood to make sure that our bales are safe and dry. Plus, now we'll have a built in window seat at every window! Trusses should arrive this week so that the roof and balcony work can begin. Less than two weeks until the straw bales arrive! Sign up to volunteer for a shift with us here and learn more about straw bale construction! We'll start setting bales Oct. 4th! For the first three days of that week, straw bale expert, Andrew Morrison, will train our crew in completing a wall and a corner from bale to mesh/sew to plaster. From there, we're aiming to finish the rest by Sunday, the 10th. To do that, we need your help! The straw bale process involves three main steps, which I outline below. You'll also see this in our Google Form to sign up! Step 1. Setting the strawbales - involves cutting bales in order to fit around wooden posts, tying smaller bales to fit them in smaller spaces, and setting bales in the walls in general. (Photo: stuffing the top bale row under the box beam, which is the wooden structure at the top of using thin pieces of smooth plywood to wedge in the bale) Step 2. Meshing and sewing the walls - means affixing two-inch wire mesh to the exterior of the bales and sewing them into place with twine. (Photo: a couple of teams meshing the far wall and the team on the far right meshing around a window) Step 3. Plastering - involves mixing hydraulic lime plaster in a cement-type mixer, putting it on the walls, and smoothing it out. (Photo: applying the "scratch coat" or the first coat to the walls.)
The concrete subcontractor let Katie "help" with the pour.
Katie here. Finally getting a City permit is worthy of a post from each of us. This has been such a long time coming. And this process has further cemented my run for city council.
Minneapolis has a number of challenges - two major ones being housing and climate change. We cannot meet either if every innovative sustainable development takes 18 months from permit application to approval. Just two examples of barriers we encountered, but should be easy to overcome:
Our experience is what is it is. But it doesn't have to be this way. In fact, the City claims to want better. A goal in the 2040 Plan aims to: "k. Help secure and fund demonstration projects of emerging or underutilized technologies, concepts, designs and methods." This means that at a high level innovation is welcome and encouraged. However, that spirit has not reached all levels of the City enterprise. My goal is to make sure that it does. Our project demonstrates that breaking through red tape is painful, yet possible. It just shouldn't be this hard. Our City processes can and must evolve if we're to meet our goals. We now have our permit. It's time to figure out the rest of the timeline to get this thing up before the snow flies! Just a quick post to say: WE FINALLY HAVE OUR FINAL BUILDING PERMIT!!!
This has been a slog and I am so thankful to the awesome, badass, persistent women at Precipitate for all of their work on this. We first started the design and application process some 18-24 months ago. After getting through zoning/use permitting and variances with small but workable hiccups, we were bogged down by a much less efficient or user-friendly process to get our building permit. It ended up taking more than a year to go from zoning approval to building permit, with the pandemic certainly not helping matters at all. I can only hope that the process gets smoother and faster for future applicants. Moral of the story: make sure you have a great team going into any project, but especially so if your project will be unusual or new in any way. Thanks Precipitate! Onward! Dear Readers, I'm terribly sorry that this update comes more than a month after the last update. I was making interim updates to my IG, but was neglecting my duties to the website. For this, you have my sincerest apologies. Also, this has been the sadder part of the build to watch, but we'll get to that in a second. Anyway, updates below! Peter Since our last episode, the slab area of our foundation has been further excavated, insulation has been added everywhere, plumbing has been placed, internal drain tile installed, and a radon wrap is over the top ahead of the final concrete slab pour, which will happen sometime this week when it stops raining (but also, yay rain! Minneapolis is in a pretty bad drought this summer). That probably sounded like a lot, but really what it means is: we have had the lion's share of our fossil based products installed and it has been PAINFUL to watch. We have added more foam insulation that was cut extensively with chainsaws and there is honestly a lot of extra material leftover that will be heading to a landfill, as well. The worst is the pool of foam pellets forming in the rain out my window as we speak, which we will have to clean up and remediate as we clean up the site before we eventually add vegetation in the future. Glass half full side of things, even if it is foam based, it has been great to see the care taken to make sure everything fits and is tight. The three guys that have been working on this extensively over the last few weeks have done a great job and our architects and builder have done a good job checking quality control and making repairs if something isn't quite right. Our house will be very well insulated, which is much easier to do from the onset than as a retrofit. Also, though Katie has built houses before both with Habitat For Humanity as an AmeriCorps vista and with her dad in Indiana, I have no residential building experience of note. So for me, it has been interesting to learn, for example, that most homes don't have insulation in their foundations at all! Or similarly, I develop large solar facilities for a living and have worked with agricultural drain tile before, but I have never seen the garbage can-and-hose style drain tile that was installed here. Always learning! I will work to post my next update sooner. As mentioned above, this should end the foam part of our project as the foundation slab gets poured as soon as the rain stops. That should also make our site start to look a lot cleaner and more interesting. Final piece we are waiting on is our final final *final* building permit, which we should have today or tomorrow if the City hits its timelines. More to come! Another whirlwind couple of build days are behind us! Quite honestly, after how long permitting and approvals took for this project, the speed of the actual build progress is almost overwhelming. Crews came back yesterday to finish the excavation for the footings and begin doing the sewer connection work, both for our basement toilet and to connect the future water and sewer line to the triplex. Today, the sewer connection was mostly finished, our excavation was approved by our engineers (who also happen to be former ultimate frisbee teammates of Peter's), insulation foam was added, and the footings were poured. I'll be honest, it is hard to do my own work when I can just watch this out the window. I might have to go back to the office more just to focus a bit. Yesterday and today were both exciting and a good reminder of how far we have to go in terms of sustainable construction. We worked with our architect and builder to reduce the amount of oil products (foams, glues, etc) as much as possible. Right now, we couldn't find a usable, approved, remotely affordable product for foundation insulation or the mandatory radon remediation plastic layer underneath the foundation (even ethanol plastics aren't currently approved here). As you can see in some of the pictures today, we are at least trying to repurpose/reuse any plywood or OSB that we need in the project and are even planning to use planks instead of OSB for roof decking. We know this project won't be perfect. The chainsaws today were electric, but we still have the foam in general, gas powered bobcat and digger, cement and cement truck, etc. We are trying our best and hope that our project will continue to push the construction industry in a more sustainable direction! Big shoutout to our architects (Precipitate) and builder (A-squared) for accommodating our sustainable goals and bothering sales reps about more sustainable products. This kind of pressure will make a difference in the long run! Minimal construction hiccups so far. Our triplex sewer line was a bit shallower in the cement than expected, so we had to pivot our basement layout slightly. Our basement stairs will have a new, extended landing platform, but nothing too tragic overall. We do have to find a light to go with our new basement WC. The slats let in some light, but I'm not sure that is what the user is looking for... Onward! We are officially underway! The Final Countdown is over and work has officially kicked off on our site. What a difference a few hours can make! Many of our lilacs sadly had to be removed, but we now have a large trench opened up as we prepare our site for plumbing work in just a few days and concrete work right behind that. Though we have always known that our site is quite small (1/8 acre, including the existing triplex), it is always a bit amusing to see contractor's realize that fact. So right now, instead of having the soil pile off to the side of the project area, it is piled up in the middle of our future home footprint. We also moved our trash, recycle, and compost bins snug up to our neighbor's house for the time being and restacked our firewood elsewhere. One fun workaround for our small site: since we don't really have room for a portable toilet, we are simply providing access to our unfinished basement, which happened to have a small WC from back when there were coal workers who would be in the basement shoveling for the furnace. The WC hasn't had a toilet in many years, but the pipes are still there. It turns out that it will be cheaper to just install a toilet again than trying to figure out how to make a portable toilet work. Plus, it will smell better and not be outside. A reasonably good solution! More to come next week as work continues, but check out the progress photos below. Peter here. Much like this classic 80s ballad, we have been counting down to this moment for much longer than anyone expected. July 9th, 2021. Tomorrow. We finally begin construction on our new strawbale home! The site has been staked anew and an excavation crew will be arriving in the morning to clear out the small jungle that our backyard has turned into to prepare for plumbing and concrete work over the next couple of weeks.
We are so excited to finally be starting! A big thank you to Precipitate for their work on designing our home and getting it through the endless slog of permitting with the City of Minneapolis, Andrew Morrison of StrawBale.com for constantly providing his time through permitting and with our architect and build team (looking forward to his straw bale training this fall!), Charity Weibel from Old National Bank for sticking with me over more than two years and helping to create a workable finance mechanism for this project, and Andrew Nelson of A-Squared for agreeing to build this crazy project with us! This team has put up with a lot to get this project to where it is now and we can't wait to see it all come to life over the next several months. Get ready/excited for more website content, photos, and projects updates as the on-site work begins! I will be playing The Final Countdown on repeat for the rest of the day. I get to talk about solar! Peter here, and I finally get to talk about something that is quite firmly in my wheelhouse and passion area.
An incredibly exciting design element of our build is that we are expanding our existing solar array. Between our triplex and our garage, we already had a 9.3 kWdc solar array on our property. These were from 31 300Wdc SolarWorld mono modules that were installed in 2017. There were some positives and negatives here. Our installer unfortunately oversized our array so we didn’t qualify for a substantial state incentive, but we did maximize our on site potential. Another negative is that SolarWorld was actually one of two companies that led a push to introduce solar tariffs against China (and eventually most of the rest of the world), which the Trump administration very disappointingly implemented as a result. Even with the tariffs, SolarWorld (side note: a German company that just had operations in the US) ended up going bankrupt, so getting any replacement parts in the future will be a pain. Anyway, swinging back to the positives. Our new structure is going to have a perfectly southern oriented, wide open roof. We uninstalled and saved the 10 modules that had been installed on our garage. In addition to those, we will be adding 22 new Heliene 380Wdc bifacial modules and a 315 Heliene mono module. Why am I so excited about this? First off, Heliene is a Canadian company but has a manufacturing operation in Mountain Iron, MN. This is the only active solar module manufacturer in Minnesota. Very cool that this is happening in our state and in an area of the state that definitely needs the industry support. Additionally, these new modules are bifacial, meaning that the backsheet of the module is clear instead of metallic. This allows some light to pass through, reflect, and then produce some energy on the backside of the module. It doesn’t double production, but it can add a 15-20% boost. So cool! One last design note on the solar array. We are going to test out if the bifacial modules can be used as a quasi-stained glass window. We didn’t want to alter the existing thermal envelope of the building, so we designed a peak-a-boo opening above the balcony. This will have a bifacial module above it, which will allow some light through. The bifacial module won’t have the same efficiency benefit since the reflection won’t happen, but it will hopefully add a cool element to our balcony! At a minimum, it will allow us to show off the technology to groups interested in visiting our site in person. If you have more solar questions, please comment below and we will do our best to answer them! Sometimes to my wife’s chagrin, I could talk about solar all day. If you ever want to come visit our site in person, definitely let us know that, too. A major goal of this project is to demonstrate the various technology elements and try to normalize them in the marketplace. Everything is being designed with that in mind to be able to share the knowledge. Come say hi! Passivhaus standards largely have to do with how tight a building envelope is, how well a building holds a steady temperature, and how many air exchanges are needed per hour. Many design elements, including window size and placement, wall thickness and material, etc. can impact this. Consistency of insulation is very important because hot air will always try to displace cold air, so gaps in insulation can create a chimney effect and cause air exchange requirements to increase.
In our case, we are using straw bales and plaster for our wall insulation. A big question that Katie and I are interested to answer in our build is whether straw bale walls will be tight and consistent enough to achieve passive house certification (US or international). The main concern is on the seams of the bales. We will, of course, try to pack the bales as tightly as possible. No matter how tight we pack them, though, there will still be small seams between the bales. Will those small seams be too much to meet the passive certification? Check back with us after the build to find out! If you have more questions about this, let us know in the comments below! Let’s talk about how we are planning on paying for this project of ours. Peter here! This is a good one to skip if you don’t want a probably too long post about our project finance. I will not be holding back!
As you hopefully picked up from our discussion about budgets, we didn’t really stick to our initial goal. In fact, we blew that original budget out of the water. Then, for a fun wrinkle, our economy plunged into a major crisis as COVID-19 spread across the globe, stocks plunged briefly before making a wild recovery (also stonks), and many of us sat at home wondering if and how anything would ever get back to a comparable “normal.” Now it’s time to pay for a major construction project! Cool cool cool. Financing this project has probably been my main contribution, other than the solar panel elements. I have been working with various lenders to see if we can make something work for probably 18 months now. Part of this is because we ended up delaying our project a year, as referenced in our post about budgets. Mainly, though, financing this project simply presented its own challenges and I wanted to give us a long runway to figure out how to make the money work. With unique projects like ours, I have learned that there is a sweet spot in which banks to talk to. Small, local banks likely don’t have the risk profile or tolerance to take on the project. They may not even have the financial mechanisms in place. Big banks have some standard products in construction finance that probably could work, but the terms weren’t great and there wasn’t much flexibility in term length, payment schedule, and underwriter needs, not to mention restrictions that they started implementing to hedge against a potential recession. Those last two pieces can be challenging because underwriters can get a little spooked by projects they don’t know enough about. What worked best for us was to work with a midsize, regional bank (we are working with Old National). This gave the bank a big enough portfolio and risk tolerance to work with us, while still being small enough to be somewhat personable and flexible to work with our needs. Our process started, quite honestly, with me making several cold calls. Sometimes I would get routed around to the various mortgage groups. As we have mentioned, our project is weird. We are refinancing a contract for deed that we have in place for our triplex to a traditional mortgage to open up our wider lending options (home equity financing or construction financing). We aren’t a traditional mortgage, though, because we are immediately trying to build a new structure on the property. Are we a quadplex? A triplex + a single family home? Two separate properties? Who knows! This confusion scared some banks off or ended up with me getting routed to people who couldn’t help me. Eventually, though, I found a few folks who weren’t the correct people but were interested/curious and helpful enough to get me to their higher ups. I was given the chance to pitch our project and convince them that they should give us a chance. We settled on a construction loan style that would refinance the property out of the contract for deed (so the deed will move to the bank like a traditional mortgage). At the same time, the bank would issue a 4x5 construction loan. We were allowed to lend up to 80% of the value of the appraised future property minus the outstanding amount owed on the existing mortgage. The amount of money that we want to borrow will be amortized as if it were a 30 year product, but there were then 4x 5-year terms where the loan would be updated and renewed. At the end of that final renewal term, there would be a balloon payment for the remainder of the amount. (If all of the above made your eyes/brain hurt, some more details are below.) The downside of this structure is that the interest rate gets updated at each renewal. With the economy being rather tense right now due to COVID-19, lending rates are incredibly good. I would love nothing more than to lock this into a traditional 30-year mortgage product and be done. With our major construction piece, though, we couldn’t do that. A traditional home equity refinance would have only covered ~40% of our build cost and we didn’t have the cash to cover the remainder. So, hopefully interest rates don’t skyrocket at any of the 5 year renewal points. The interest rates are at least locked in during the 5-year terms. The upside of this financing scheme is that we will have the option of refinancing to a more traditional product at any of the 5-year renewal time periods. If interest rates stay low, for example, we could convince a bank at that point to convert all of the outstanding debt on the property into a traditional product and stretch the payments out over a traditional 15 or 30 year term. Now, I know many people wouldn’t necessarily be on board with paying all of the extra interest incurred by continually stretching out payments, but the saving grace of this project for us is that the triplex at the front of the property covers a large portion of the overall payment. It doesn’t cover everything in this case, but it certainly covers a healthy chunk. If we can stretch out the payments into the future to lower our monthly payments, we can cover more and more of that amount with our revenue from the triplex and maybe even get back to cash neutral or positive at some point. This last piece is a huge element for us. Though the triplex can make our property confusing for many banks, it also provides a big, revenue generating asset that banks liked as a collateral component. Being able to show rental history and project revenue made the banks more comfortable and at least willing to hear us out. I know other folks will have different collateral that they can use (stock portfolios, other properties, etc.), but this is how we did it. Turning our property into a quadplex, though, did add one extra challenge. To determine our lending limit, we had to get an appraisal of our post-construction property (our as-built appraisal). Minneapolis does not have many quadplexes (we actually had to get a special permit for this construction - see previous blog posts on Cluster Developments), particularly ones with one of the units being high end, eco-friendly, and brand new. Luckily, the bank we ended up working with found an appraiser familiar with environmentally-conscious construction elements (mainly solar, but better than nothing!). To close our financing, we have had to show tax returns, credit statements, title reports, full site surveys, construction design sets, zoning and building permits, building guarantees, and the aforementioned appraisal. We have provided an initial construction budget but are now waiting for our final construction budget now that we have our final design elements picked out and approved permits in place. Thanks for sticking with me through this long post! If you have questions, ask them in the comments below and I will do my best to answer. Peter here with a quick update. As Katie mentioned in our last post, we had a very productive meeting with a large group of influential people including code officials, architects, subject matter experts, and policy makers. After a few more rounds of questions, our Code Alternate Review has been approved! Strawbale wall assembly is going to be allowed in Minneapolis, at least with this particular team and this set of plans. Not exactly opening up the flood gates, but this is an important step for anyone that wants to follow in our footsteps and do this elsewhere in Minneapolis in the future.
This approval isn't quite our final greenlight, but we are now on much firmer footing to be able to plan our construction schedule, finalize financing, and order materials. The last approval that we are waiting for is of our building permit. Given that the last main hurdle has been cleared, though, we are now quite confident that we will be able to construct the Uptown Strawhouse in 2021! We have had a few other posts sitting in our drafts about our solar array, project finance, and passive house standards that we will release shortly to make up for our relatively quiet last several months. I hope you all are getting as excited as we are! Today is a big day. Not only is the most consequential election ever happening right now, we also had a very important meeting with City staff and elected officials to discuss our Code Alternate Review denial. At this point, we've gone through the Planning Commission, PDR, and are now trying to apply for a building permit. To do that, we need to submit a Code Alternate Review (CAR) proposal. This is needed specifically for the straw bale wall construction. We submitted our CAR in September and were subsequently denied with the only basis provided being moisture concerns and failed precedents. Although our submittal had paid significant detail to moisture, none of that effort was mentioned in the short denial. On top of that, there is no formal appeals process for a CAR denial. Talk about frustrating. So what could we do than get higher-level decision makers involved? And so we did. We wound up with a meeting including people for whom this sustainability focused housing project would be of interest including:
In the meeting, we detailed our due diligence in research, the repeated denials of our requests for conversations with code staff, our request for and resulting non-existence of documentation from failed precedents, as well as our knowledge of and commitment to moisture management best practices. In the end, it was clear that policy and policy makers point toward wanting more projects like the Uptown Strawhouse in the city and that the current barrier has been the inability to get a conversation with code staff. Covid has honestly made everything about this project hard, so that may be the reason for this difficulty. Thankfully though, the meeting today has led us over this barrier, and we anticipate meeting with code officials in the next few weeks to go over the details and answer any of their concerns. Hooray! We're so grateful to all of the attendees to recognize the promise and opportunity of our project and to work together to find ways forward for more climate innovative projects. I also created a handout about our project in preparation for the meeting that gives a good overview of the project and how we're addressing moisture.
At a macro level, 2020 has been a year of a major pandemic and a global recession. In Minneapolis, the police murder of George Floyd at the start of summer sparked civil unrest and a community reckoning on race and policing. It's been a lot and Ben Folds does a good job summarizing this in this short song entitled, "2020."
We and our project aren't in a bubble, and like everyone else, we are effected by these events. Here is the current state of the project:
Peter here. In addition to our passive house and straw bale blending (see my previous, debut blog post!), we are also trying to blend an Austrian Hütte/chalet aesthetic with the more common Victorian era St Anne. The Austrian Hütte elements hearken back to when Katie and I lived in Austria (Katie in Linz and Peter in a few spots around Tyrol), while the Victorian era St Anne style is quite common in our neighborhood. In this case, that St Anne style isn’t just in the surrounding neighborhood, but quite literally in our new house’s front yard. Our triplex has been restored to its original wood lap appearance that it was built with in 1893.
This all brings quite a few balls that we need to juggle. Aesthetically, we have a plaster facade from the straw bale construction to go along with tilt-turn German windows. Our roof will have deep eaves and a sweeping wood beam element on the front. To pay homage to the neighborhood St Anne style, though, we are considering taller, skinnier doors and lantern features. Will this combination work? No idea! Honestly, leave your comments below with what you think. The nice part about building our own house is we can kind of do whatever we want with it. Being tucked at the back of the property also means that if our neighbors don’t like it, they can’t really see it anyway. Huzzah! I was honestly torn about this combination at first because of the reputation of many “eco” endeavors. When I think of eco-friendly clothing, for example, I don’t necessarily think of normal clothing made out of organic materials in ethically run factories. I tend to think of new age hippie designs that I don’t want to touch. Early eco-home design has meant something similar, in my opinion. Boxy, futuristic looks with an obsession with a stark neon accent color (often a gaudy neon green). Not for me. Is our Austrian/Victorian cross a similar unholy union? I certainly hope not, but sound off below and let us know what you think! Will it change anything? Of course not! But this is the internet and we are here for your comments anyway. Just know that we are at least trying to blend this in a way that will make us happy and fit in well enough with the neighborhood. When it came to removing the garage, we hired Better Futures Minnesota. Rather than demolish the garage, we had it deconstructed. It was an opportunity to 1. have materials be repurposed and 2. support men who had formerly been incarcerated to get back on their feet. A no brainer if there ever was one!
And they did a wonderful job. They were good at communicating schedules, setting expectations, completing the job, and even cleaning up stray nails. They were able to save a lot of wood as well as the garage door, which they then sell at their shop. We feel good that the material isn't wasted, and the sales support the workers. Win-win! Below is a letter that shows the impact of working with Better Futures.
Our awesome architects at Precipitate are far enough along with construction details that they could create a couple of visualizations of the second floor! These are drafts for us to react to, and they're super fun. Take a 360 degree look here and here!
In these views you'll see our kitchen, the location of the dining area (which will be an Austrian style nook), the living room, and staircase to the first floor. If you pan up, you'll see "Peter's Perch" loft area, which will be accessed via a sliding ladder (a la Belle borrowing books in Beauty in the Beast ). Peter here! In addition to the complexity of the build itself, we had some site constraints and challenges that we have had to deal with in advance. Given that we are building this new house behind a triplex, the site is quite tight. The overall site is just under 6,000 square feet (~⅛ acre). Where our new house will be built, we originally had a garage with a small, beach themed hang out area next to it (from the previous owners - don’t blame us!). This area also included a very nice, miniature magnolia tree and a (volunteer but thriving) white pine. On the back property line, we have a few Ash trees and a series of power lines, including a utility pole in the NE corner. In most parts of Minneapolis, these lines would be running in an alleyway, but our block happens to be a rare one without an alley, meaning that utility easements run directly through properties. In addition to electric (Xcel Energy), those poles are also used to string telecommunication lines (Comcast and CenturyLink for us).
In order to prepare our site for this build, I have spent quite a bit of time both working to clear the trees among the power lines, save the trees that we can, deconstruct the garage (deconstruct instead of demolish - reuse some of the materials!), and bury the power lines to gain us more space at the back of the property. The last part has been the most challenging. Our neighborhood is filled with a lot of housing types, from single family to large apartment buildings. We also mix in a lot of commercial properties. The electric needs are quite varied and our utility poles are crowded with wires to meet all the various needs. This creates a challenge because there are constraints on how much infrastructure can go on any given pole. We are unlucky in that the poles directly to the north and south both have transformers on them. With the number of lines that we also have running to our triplex (particularly because we also have solar and high gauge wiring for heat pumps), our poles are already close to capacity. To make everything work for this site, we are actually going to have to add a second pole. We will now have a pole in the far NE and SE corners, with underground lines running in between. This is a bit gaudy and annoying, but at the same time, we want to bury the electric lines because we are trying to gain every possible, usable square foot on a very tight property. By burying the electric lines, it gains us at least 2-3 feet on the back property line, which will make our central yard feel larger and give us greater separation from our triplex. Though it may seem minor, this makes a big deal for the feel of our site. Strangely enough, in order to bury our electric lines, our utility (Xcel Energy) is having us dig our own trench and provide conduit and meter upgrades. I find it quite odd that the utility would want us to do this work for them. It is also a pain in the butt because nobody wants to dig a trench for us on a tight lot. Luckily, we managed to find an awesome tree company (Daniel Thompson Tree Services) willing to do all of our tree work AND the trenching for us. Daniel has been amazing and was in the trees for 3.5 straight hours, casually dropping trees in a narrow window around power lines. He saved our beautiful magnolia tree and it is thriving in its new location. I highly recommend his work. On the electrical side, we needed a slip sleeve installed to move from an overhead connection to underground. Again, a pain in the butt, but my cousin is an electrician and handling that work for us through his company. I’m not sure there are many lessons learned here, but I wanted to lay out the extra work needed in addition to the actual construction for this project. I coordinated all of these projects (set the scope, solicited bids, negotiated, and coordinated timelines), so these are all costs that haven’t necessarily been captured in our budgeting discussion (see previous blogs posts). These projects are complex, particularly on such a tight site. Hopefully it works out for us! As always, let us know if you have any questions about the work we have done and we are happy to share resources. Honestly, this and financing are what give me the biggest heartburn at night. Damn is budgeting hard. Peter here!
Designing new products or being an early adopter of new products is expensive. Particularly if the products are bucking long-standing trends, they can both be a financial headache and a regulatory one. As an easy example, our thicker straw bale walls necessitated us asking for setback variances (to avoid shrinking our living space) and a lot of extra hurdles to ensure the building officials were comfortable with the safety of straw bale construction. Being on an urban lot also means that our project has more regulation (higher permit fees), stricter work standards, and tighter lots. The last part has a tendency to naturally drive up prices because it is inconvenient to even get to where we want to build. Minnesota additionally has strict rules on electricians that also drives up prices. Lump all of these pieces into wanting natural materials, often only found with speciality vendors or from abroad, and the price tag can explode in a hurry. There is no way to hide the fact that this is an expensive project. We are building our dream house that we plan on being in for however many years we are lucky enough to be around for. Balancing that long-term nature with the nearer-term concern of needing to pay for this project has been a challenge. We also quite frankly didn’t realize how much permits, architects, site prep work (tree clearing, Xcel line burial, etc.) and design consulting was going to cost. When it is all said and done, the full cost of this house will be almost as much as we spent to purchase the triplex on the front of the lot. That has been a brutal realization for me. We started with a budget of $300,000 for this project. Once we had picked out the materials that we wanted to use (eco-conscious, avoiding fossil fuel products as much as possible, lots of European elements, etc.), it quickly became clear that we wouldn’t even be close to this. We paused the project for a year to figure out what a more realistic budget would be, what compromises we were willing to make (if any), and if we could make all the money line up (financing post upcoming). In the end, we decided to build the house with very few compromises on materials. There are some that we can’t get around for building code reasons (drywall underneath the roof for fire code or the 6 mm polyethylene layer that we had to put underneath our foundation for radon protection), but we decided to follow a German phrase: wenn schon, denn schon. This translates roughly to “if you’re going to do it, do it fully.” As embarrassing as it will be if we have to delay this project by another year to pay for this, we are building a long-term home and want to do it right. This clearly shows a level of privilege on our part and we acknowledge that and know that it won’t be the case for most folks, but we wanted to at least be open about our thought process in our blog. If you can’t be honest in a lower readership blog, where can you be honest? Will this decision stop me from having period panic attacks about where the money will come from? Absolutely not! Once financing closes, though, I will certainly breathe easier. More to come on that front! Peter here, making his blog debut! As the handful of thorough readers may have gleaned by now, both Katie and I have a very particular set of design and material needs with this project. We are hoping to mix the Passivhaus energy concepts with the straw bale elements that Katie has become enamored with from her experience in Washington state with Andrew Morrison and his workshops (see other posts on that topic).
You may be asking yourself, “Peter, why would you ever make your blog debut on a topic where Katie is clearly the more knowledgeable between the two of you?” Great question. I’m still looking for the answer. We have a lot of topics to cover and the COVID-19 stay at home orders give me a lot of time to help fill the word count (for future readers: remember this is 2020 and we have been at home for almost a month now while we work as a society to build a roadmap of how to as responsibly as possible reopen our economy during a pandemic for which we don’t yet have a vaccine). I also work in renewable energy and am at least somewhat familiar with/have been paying attention to our design plans. Plus, I just lean on my wife to fill in my knowledge gaps and keep typing along. Back on topic, though, an example of the challenges of blending passive house and straw bale construction came up this week that may be of interest to you, dear reader. The topic was window placement. Not where they go on the wall (though that has also been discussed to ensure proper daylighting and structural stability and may come up in a different post), but rather where they go in the wall. One of the challenges (and great opportunities!) with straw bale construction is that the walls are ~21-22” thick. If you put the window on the inside of the wall, you have the widest in-swing range for your windows. You are left with a challenge, though, of keeping water from pooling on the sills and at some point seeping into the bales below (would be a HUGE problem). If we wanted to take this approach, we would need to have full metal sill wraps, with an additional waterproof layer on the bottom sill to make sure that the metal didn’t have any condensation problems that still could lead to water seeping in. The waterproofing layer almost assuredly wouldn’t meet Katie and my requirements for eco-friendly materials. On the other hand, if we put the windows on the exterior edge of the walls, the windows can’t open as far, but we get the cool aesthetic elements of window seats or shelving. We have the struggle, though, of structural stability. Attaching the windows directly to the bales would be incredibly challenging and not structurally sound. We need to build a box beam to support the window. The downside here is that the traditional box beam construction uses plywood, a material that isn’t on our desirable list either because of the glues used in its creation. There are some middle options, but they ultimately just end up taking the negative elements of both of the above options without providing any real benefits, so we will leave them out for now. What should we do? We had to make a compromise either way. Ultimately, we ended up moving the walls to the exterior wall. I personally like the window seat/shelf component and it gives us much more security that we won’t have any moisture issues with the straw bales, which is priority #1 for us as people that want to live healthily in this house. The windows won’t open as far, but we have also found that with tilt-turn windows, we more often tilt the window anyway, so neither of us are as concerned. I imagine Katie will tell me to cut out some of the narrative elements above to get to the point sooner (which I’m sure many of you will thank her for), but I appreciate you all humoring me in my debut! |
AuthorKatie Jones and Peter Schmitt chronicle their building adventure. Archives
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