Our office building project for the Trillium Lakelands Teachers’ Union features a straw bale wall system that combines conventional wood stud framing with an interior straw bale wall. Recently, we finished the exterior side of this wall system. This involved...
Straw bale wall systems have been touted for 20+ years now as a way to achieve higher insulation values with lower environmental impacts. And, having built many straw bale homes and commercial buildings now, we know this is true. However, we have also seen that...
Sustainable New Construction 2014 student Ben Bowman set up his camera and took some great sequences of the construction process at our teachers’ union office project. Here are the two sequences of straw bale installation and earthen plastering. In many ways,...
It’s no secret that we love clay plasters at Endeavour, and the best case scenario is being able to use a clay soil right from the building site. It just so happens that we lucked into this for the teachers’ union office project! After digging some test...
Over 20 years of building with straw bales, I have constantly experimented with new ways to integrate bale walls into buildings that are simple, cost-effective and energy/resource efficient. From load bearing to prefab panels to a variety of framing systems, I thought...
Building a roof can be intimidating, and statistically the most dangerous element of making a building. The heights involved add risk, time and a lot of effort. Whenever we have the opportunity, we build our roof structures – including all sheathing and as much...
