3 Generations Living in a Self-Built Straw Bale Home – FULL TOUR

This is our straw bale house and we're in the southern gulf islands of British Columbia. We built the house, Colin and I. On the first half we did a timber frame structure around the bales. On the second half we did a stick frame and there's living roofs on all of the roofs. We have three generations living here so there's us and our two kids and my mother and it's been really great to all live together on the property. It just made sense to us. To have multiple generations on the property instead of, you know, this kind of isolation idea of a single family unit struggling to do everything that needs to be done. It's sort of a reciprocal care, like, you know, my mom helped us a lot while we were building and while the kids were young, and then as she's getting older, we're helping her out with things. And that just feels much more natural. We purchased the land 16 years ago. And the land is 3.25 acres. It's on the north side of a valley, so we have very good sun exposure. When we bought the property, my mom, Margaret, invested in the land with us and we wouldn't have been able to buy it without her financial contribution. So we built a 900 square foot in-law suite, which is designed specifically for my mom, who's an artist. It's the very top section and we all moved into that in 2012 when we finished that section. And then we spent seven years living in that house together as the kids grew up, all in the same space, before we finished the second half of the house, which gave us a little more autonomy for us and our kids and gave Nana her own space, which she was very excited about. I don't know what I'm talking about. The house is about 2,000 square feet interior square footage for the whole house and it's technically one house by code but because there's two separate entrances and different levels it feels like two houses but they're just attached with a walkway. The upper half of the house is about 900 square feet inside and then about a thousand square feet with the two levels down below. This doesn't reflect the living roofs with the four-foot overhangs on the south side and two-foot overhangs on the other sides to keep the rain off the walls. So when you look at the house, people are like, it's huge. But you're seeing a lot of roof and thick straw bale walls. We decided to build straw bale because of the excellent R-value and its ability to hold in the warmth and out the cold, which makes heating and cooling our house very, very easy. The other thing I was really drawn to about straw bale is that it's a breathable wall system, so you don't have to have your plastic wrap and all of this other code stuff in your house that I didn't want to have there. And it also allowed us to use a lot of local and natural materials. The first half of the house that we built, we did a wood peg timber frame. So the roof is held up with the timber frame. And the second half of the house, we didn't have enough time or money to really do the full timber frame. So we decided to go with basically a two by four stud wall so that we could take the straw bales and stand them up in between the two by fours. We wanted to do all clay plasters so that the walls remained breathable. So all the plastering that we did was, we were mentored by Tracy Calvert. She worked for years with Cobworks over on Main Island and she pretty much walked us through all the different layers and what we had to do to make sure that the bales were safely sealed in and tucked away. We had help of the foundation with the roof. We had lots of work parties, so you could also say that members of the community built our house as well, with the clay plaster specifically, with putting soil on the roof. You know, every time I didn't know exactly how to do something, I would ask a friend in the community who did know how to do that, but Wendy and I did probably 90% of the work ourselves. Welcome to Stony Pocket and this is our straw bale house. You can kind of see a few things going on here right at the entrance. Big overhang, four foot overhang on the south side of the house so that in the summer months the sun barely goes into the house at all and in the winter months when the sun is low in the sky the sun goes all the way in and up the back wall about three feet. So we really get the benefit of the passive solar. And the house stays cool in summer. It warms up nicely in the winter, and you can kind of see the walls, straw bale walls, and we've used layers of clay plaster, and then we recently finished it with a lime plaster. This is a lime plaster. It's about an eighth of an inch thick. Just over top of the clay and we did a lot of color samples to try and get the colors that we were interested in sort of picked from the colors of the arbutus trees around the island. This is the mudroom. We made it a separate entrance room so that we can close this door specifically in the winter and keep this as a unheated space. So there's lots of places for jackets and boots and hats and everything that you need to take off when you come in. So the lower story is basically the living area. Kind of come... Through the mudroom straight into the kitchen and then it opens up into dining nook and living area and the staircase goes up to the bedrooms and the bathroom. The kitchen we designed to be all open with the main room so that we can pass things back and forth and, you know, socialize with the family while in the kitchen and in the living area. So it's all one big room. I also, because of the straw bales and the curved living roof, I didn't want upper cabinets. So we designed the kitchen to have a big pantry. We took the fridge and set it into the wall so that you don't hear the sound of the fridge cycling on and off. It also helps with the insulation. And it sits back into the room. And behind here is a utility room, which has the hot water and our heat pump and in-floor heating system. And the countertops were super fun. That's fun. Made them out of concrete. I took blue gin bottles from the recycling center and I smashed them all up and then we sprinkled the glass all around the countertop to give a hint of blue that we have you can kind of see in the walls and so it turned out really really well. We're really happy and it's super durable. The floor in the whole lower half of the house is Mexican tile and we chose this because it's a slab on grade so basically we have concrete floor underneath which has in it all of our heating and so for the in-floor heating to work best and also for the passive solar to work best you want mass lots of mass in your house and the concrete countertops is one way the floor with the tile is another the plaster on the walls all of these things when the sun comes through the windows it accepts that heat and warms up and then releases it later on as the temperature changes. Um, this is the living room and dining space, um, kind of just open floor plan to maximize the length of the house, which gives us as much window and passive solar without being too deep. The house is, it's 45 feet long, but it's only 15 feet deep. Both the two lower levels so that all the rooms get sunlight, which is great for heating the house. Other features in the living room, we decided to do a bed nook, we call it the book nook, but it's also a guest bed. The other purpose of it is storage, so in the house there's not a lot of the storage, it's all built in. So we've got big drawers underneath there, we have drawers underneath the seats in the eating nook, so kind of a built-in L-shaped bench. and then chairs on the other side with drawers underneath that you can pull up for storage. We also did built-ins the bookshelves and you know desk area all built in and another unit down here beside the fireplace where we keep the computer and the stereo works really well for organizing our lives. The wood stove, actually, we bought used from a neighbor down the road, and it's actually turned out to be a fantastic stove. It works really well. You can put the wood in from the top or from the front. You can damp it down. It has a re-burn in it as well, so it is efficient. We go through about a quarter of a cord of wood to heat the house for the winter. We light a fire every... two or three days and we pretty much just let it go out over a few hours and it's very simple space we use the in-floor heating minimally just to take the cooling off so the floor stays just slightly warm and that way we light a fire whenever the temperature gets you know low enough that we feel like we need it this is a really cool feature we saw in another friend's straw bale house It's a wood pass-through. So behind this wall is a covered outdoor space where all of our wood is stacked and we can just open the door from the hatch and it's full of wood and kindling and then we can put it in the fire, close the door and we don't have to carry the wood in and out of the house. This is the bathroom. It's kind of built halfway up the level of the house. We found this tub by the side of the road and so we didn't design the bathroom with a corner tub like this but after we got this corner tub we kind of had to change our plans a little bit but it's worked out really really well. We're super happy with it. This around here is the shower. And then we have a little section for the toilet in here and a pretty long counter for the sink. This sink also came from some friends of mine in Victoria, so now every time I see the sink I think of them. We've just come up the stairs and now we're on the second level of the house which is the bedrooms and also the entrance to the in-law suite. So off to the right here we've got basically a covered walkway that goes through to another set of stairs that go up into the in-law suite and then on this side as we come through we have a large room. It was a shared bedroom for our two kids when they And we're gonna go into the master bedroom. This room, that's probably eight feet wide and 15 feet deep. Everything's built in, the bed's built in. Again, drawers underneath the bed for storage, built-in cabinets and storage for all of our clothing and stuff like that. And a window that we can get out onto the roof when we wanna go outside too. Hi, I'm Margaret and I'm part of the family that have appeared in this beautiful spot. And Wendy's my daughter and then my grandkids are amazing. I've had a good time with them growing up and Colin's foresight to see what could happen to this site is just unbelievable, yeah. This upper part of the house was the first part that was built. And it was intended that it would be for me, and this is what it is. It's all one big open space. The fireplace here, when Colin went to put the fireplace in, I asked him to put it up high so that I wouldn't be on my hands and knees trying to stoke a fireplace when I'm the age I am. So it works beautifully. And Colin did all the stonework. All the stone is off the property. We all worked on that together. And there's in-floor heating on all the floors, so it's really a cozy place to be. The kitchen is like a galley kitchen on a sailboat. It's easy to work in. And on the other side is the sleeping area. And the dining room used to have a nook in it, but when they moved, I had the nook pulled out and I brought out my dining room table. And right in the middle of it all is this fantastic shower made out of pop cans in a circle. And it was the only way we could fit it into the design of the house. So the bathroom is very narrow but the shower is just amazing and then you walk through the door on if you're facing the shower the door on the right leads to the studio and the entrance the mudroom entrance. Five of us lived in here for about eight years. We all shared the space and it got a little bit crowded but it was fun it was fun living with them all. But now we have our separate spaces we're not on top of each other like we used to be. We do get along, and there's never any real challenges. I was for a while helping out with the gardening and baking and cooking, and then I was always sort of the in-house nanny. I've had the most enjoyment watching their life unfold. I'm retired. I had always wanted to be an artist, so I finally got back into doing what I wanted to do. I never thought I would ever see the day that I would live in a place that I thought was a dream. It's just the most comfortable, coziest place. It's really amazing. I am the youngest child, so I guess the youngest in the whole household. I live right here. This is my little bedroom. It's on the second floor. I remember when I was a kid, a lot of my birthday parties, we'd invite families over with all my friends, all the kids stomping around in the clay plaster to mix up the cob before lathering around the walls. And it was always a big community gathering. It was really fun to help put together the house in that way. Growing up in a multi-generational home is really cool. I really enjoyed it as a kid because it meant that There was always another person there that wasn't just my parents who I could go and hang out with and learn from and be inspired by. Creativity especially since Nana's such an artist. I don't think we had too many big challenges. I mean the kitchen upstairs is pretty small, so that was a challenge. But I just thoroughly enjoyed it. I mean, we made a small space work for a long time, and that's just because we made space for each other and let each other have time and listen to each other. I'm studying music, but I come back here for the summers, and it's such a beautiful place to return to. So I hope to be a musician and a producer and just make art, because that's what I feel really inspired to do. Behind me here is my little studio setup. So I've been writing away, working on my second album, so I'm excited. A daughter and a granddaughter and a sibling in the family here. It's been really nice to grow up in a multi-generational home. We've had my grandma, or nana, living with us. I really enjoyed my nana's teaching us art and cooking, and the talent she has that she's able to pass down through living with us have made a huge impact on me. Once the second half of the house was done, I was actually working with my mum, doing natural plastering with our friend Tracy, who taught us. So that was really rewarding to actually have a really meaningful role in completing the house. I live in this little cabin on the property. It's got a little bed, it's got a little kitchen, two burner propane stove, and a little sink, and then it's got an outdoor shower and there's a little outhouse up the trail. I'm studying music right now. Before I was doing that, I was just working on the island doing gardening and landscaping. And I'll hopefully be here in between going to school. When we bought the property, there was basically about an acre down here that's all open and we knew we wanted to garden there. And then there was about two acres of forest in the back and we knew we didn't want to cut down any trees. And there's a spring. On the property that just comes right out of the bedrock, so the first thing we did was actually dig the pond, and that was a real central thing in the yard because it's about 50 feet across, so we wanted everything to go around that, including the house. We have so much fruit on the little farm area here and so we need to process it and having help with that, the kids, everyone puts in on that when they're around. Anna loves making jam and blackberry pie and those kind of things and so that's obviously amazing. We paid $270,000 for the raw land and we were building on a line of credit so we would borrow the money. Build for a while, I would go back to work, work for a while, and then we did that back and forth so when we finished the house we didn't actually owe very much money, which was really nice. I think we figured it was about $80,000 to build the first half of the house. After that, my cob woodworking shop was about $20,000 to build. And then the second half of the house was quite a bit more because during COVID, building costs went through the roof. And that doesn't include any labor fees that would have been calculated. I started a blog online called Inspirational Village and it was mostly a documentation on building the house. There's a lot of information on there about plastering methods, about straw bale methods, about how we constructed the roof. I really wanted to make it hopefully a useful resource for people who wanted to also build in the same way. I am a artist and woodworker so as soon as we finished the first half of the house I really needed to build my own woodworking shop so that I could get my ramp my business up again and start you know paying for the first half of the house. So I chose to build a cob studio. It's about 450 square feet so it's not very big and then I split all of the shakes. for the roof from driftwood that I found on the beach and put those up to make the roof undulate around as well. This is my woodworking studio and as you can see I've got a lot of sculptures out. I'm just about to do an art show. All of this is found reclaimed driftwood from the beach that's carved using I use a fro. This is my fro over here and a mallet. And that's kind of my main tool for splitting the wood. I make funky furniture and sculptures and custom signs, every piece being unique because it's all hand split. So it's a great way to have a more sustainable business than I'm recycling, reclaiming. It's been a fabulous work to do here on the islands. My secondary job is, I am also an audio engineer, so I mix most of the concerts that happen on island, I also travel off island to do sound at festivals, the kids got to grow up going to concerts and being a part of the music scene, which has been actually fun because they both have turned out to be musicians themselves. I have spent most of the years homeschooling the kids but got a loom a couple years ago so I started weaving and selling at the local markets or art shows on the island and I opened an Etsy store a number of years ago. I also work one to two days a week with a traditional Chinese doctor putting together people's herbal prescriptions, which is a fantastic job. I love it. Love working with the plant medicine. Yes, I know. We also have a band. It's actually our whole family, plus our friend down the road who writes all the songs, plus a drummer. There hasn't been a lot of challenges of living together. Maybe when we were all in that same space together. We just talk about stuff. Yeah, I think there's just a lot of patience all around. Yeah, it's going very smoothly. This has been a lot of work. We've built the house and developed the property with as much effort as a long-term vision entails. So yeah, we don't have any plans of leaving I'm leaving. at all. It's been a journey of building, you know, kind of our dream home and we've got it. Yeah. Yeah. Subscribe to Exploring Alternatives and please share this video if you liked it. If you want to follow Colin, Wendy, and their family, we'll put links to their social media and websites in the description of this video. Thanks for watching.