Tour of our handmade passive solar strawbale cabin

Hello everyone, welcome to our channel. My name is Laura and I live with my husband Jonas in a small factory on the island of Sima in Estonia. In this video I will show you our house in the forest and I will tell you what we like and what could have been done better. To contextualize, we are not expert builders, I am an engraver artist and Jonas studies geology. We learned most of the things we needed to build this house from some books, YouTube videos and we practiced a bit, building a straw mower in our previous house in Belgium. It all started with a vision for our house in some sketches. The sketches turned into a print. And the print actually turned while we were trying to build this house in recent years. It has a long and narrow shape with windows on the south side to maximize the sunlight that we can capture inside and it is mainly built with wood, straw and clay that we found locally. The internal surface is about 45 square meters and the external dimensions cover a surface of 55 square meters. For us, it looks like something between a tiny house and a small house. However, we were able to incorporate a lot of features in this small space. Let's go in. When you enter from the front sliding door, there is a storage space for shoes. In front of the kitchen area, we have made shelves. This is where I grow my tomatoes and peppers in spring, but it is used in a different way during the seasons. At the moment, it serves as a relic for pumpkins. On the left side of the house there is a corner where we have our desk with a computer to work. I have spent too much time for my tastes here recently to prepare everything for the opening of my online store. This side of the house has a noteworthy storage space. This is where we keep our jackets and camping equipment, and I keep my materials for the print I do. The day area is constantly changing, adapting to our needs at the moment. Sometimes it was a bed, a floor mattress, and soon it will be a folding bedside table. In the center of the house there is our lunch table made with a pine bush and a floor of the table made of frassino from our land. This is where all the action takes place. It is our lunch table, the table for the print, and it is where we regularly host dinner for friends and relatives. On the wall there is our copper-made sculpture tree, a mixture of clay, sand and fiber. Living in this little habitat inspires me as an artist. I really like to create images with the theme of simple cottages and habitats in nature. They captured my imagination and I love to design them and create a quiet atmosphere where you can find peace. There are some things that I really like about living in this house. Uh, such as the large windows. They give us so much natural light and we live in a climate where it can get very dark in winter. So, so it's so nice to have this natural light that comes in and also because I'm an artist. I need this natural light to work and see what I'm doing while I work on my wooden blocks. And it's particularly nice to live in this house when it's spring or autumn, because then the sun is a little lower in the sky and really comes in. And we have this little lake in front of the house. And then if the sun touches the water, then we have those reflections of water inside. And I really like to watch them. Let's move on to the kitchen. The kitchen area contains our wall stove, which we made after buying the wall stove plants at Walker Tiny House on the Internet. We love this stove. It keeps us warm during the winter and we can also use it to cook. We use about 4 cubic meters of wood to burn every winter to heat the house. There is hot water available through the tank supported by a small flow through the gas boiler. In the large closet here is our freezer and we have a bit of storage space. Our off-grid energy system is located in here and also our washing machine. In this way we do not hear too much the noises that these machines make. I particularly like the view I have in the kitchen when I wash the dishes, which is, let's face it, a rather consistent part of everyday life. At the top of the closet is our bed. It is not very high, but it has a welcoming atmosphere. We have integrated another storage space here for our things and our clothes. All to the right is our shower. We like the view we have on the pond when we take a shower. Here, we also spread our clothes to dry. There is no water inside, so we have a compost toilet near the house, outside. On the back, behind the shower, is our water reserve and the service unit. And we improvised a small storage space for our canned goods and fermentation. Another thing is that we are constantly in contact with the outside world. We do not feel as if we were closed in this small space because we have this view. Looking back, there are some things we would have done differently if we had redone it. For example, we put about 15 cm of rock wool on the floor and ceiling, but it would have made more sense to double it because most of the heat, or, disappears at home in that way. The windows, if we had the budget, would have been better with three layers of glass. So, it could be something for the future. Another thing we would have done differently is to extend the roof a little more towards the front. We counted on growing vines and roses to protect us from the summer sun, which heats the house too much, but this requires more time to settle than we had expected. Another thing I really like about this house is that it is so small. It forces you to minimize your possessions and to keep only the things you really need and that you really use in everyday life. And somehow, this gives me a lot of peace because every object has its place in this house. And there is no disorder. Because everything we have in excess, I throw it away or try to reorganize it. Why can't we fill this house with stuff? Otherwise it wouldn't be nice to live there anymore. When I look to the future, I think that this house will be like a springboard in our story. This will not be like the last house we will live in because we plan to redo all this process one day in the future. Because we had a lot of fun in the construction process and to build something perhaps even more special in the future. Thank you so much for watching, I hope it is something encouraging for you if you thought of doing something similar. In any case, I hope to see you again in another video and I wish you all very blessed holidays.