Building the Off-the-Grid Straw Bale House in Maine
A Photographic Journal
By Mick Womersley and Aimee Phillippi[1]
Introduction:
Straw bale house-building is
increasingly popular in the United States and abroad, primarily for its ease of
construction, its warmth, the use of renewable materials that would otherwise
go to waste, and the just plain idiosyncrasy typical of America’s
environmental and back-to-the-land movements.
What you will see here is a
little different. We sometimes call ourselves, jokingly, practitioners of
“WalMart sustainability,” although that corporation would probably
have a fit if it knew what we meant. We feel that the environmental
movement’s PC idea of sustainability is often impractical and even
elitist at times. It doesn’t make sense to us that a sustainable house
cost more than a working person can afford, or that you can’t currently
access the kinds of technology we demonstrate here in mass-market sources like
WalMart or Home Depot. Until you can, we’re sorry to say, America will
remain the least sustainable developed country in the world. We also believe
that sustainability is an ecological and mathematical issue, something that can
be quantified and verified like any other scientific problem.
How sensible is it to build a
house of straw? The three little pigs didn’t do so well. In dryer areas
of the country, practitioners of straw bale risk little, and don’t prove
much. Try building such a house in Maine, through two Maine summers with
rolling thunder, high humidity and, of course, bugs up the wazoo. Then see if
your house will keep you warm in fall, winter and spring. Maine has three cold seasons.
How cheap is it? We’ve
seen “designer” straw bale houses for $450,000, which surely
defeats the purpose. The house you will see in the following slides cost less
than $20,000 dollars on land leased with a 99-year or “camp” lease.
It has its problems, and certainly could use more money here and there, but
apart from some strain on credit cards, is debt free. Where we had the
wherewithal, we paid cash. Most of the money came paycheck by paycheck. Where
we didn’t, we charged, to the tune of about $7,000. The payments on
consumer debt used to buy the materials currently run about $300 per month, and
will soon drop to less than $150 for about four more years. The interest rates
are, of course, exorbitant. The other costs of running the house, including
insurance, fuel, taxes, and ground rent, are about $2,000 per year. This
compares with rental costs of $650/700 dollars per month for decent family
apartments in the same area. The total costs of owning and running the home in
the first four years are therefore about $250 a month. We think that’s
pretty affordable.
There are some cons to all
these pros. The house remains quite rough in terms of finish, and to finish it
to a very high standard is probably not a great investment, since we
don’t own the land. The solar power system needs investment if we are to
reduce our dependence on a gas generator that seems to be giving up the ghost
this fall. And we still haven’t figured out our well problems, leaving us
without reliable water in the dry season from July through October. But it is
quite livable, despite all this, and we can see the light at the end of the
tunnel for these problems too. On a cool day in fall we can come back from a
walk with the dogs to a warm, well-lit house, with soup bubbling on the
woodstove. “Life like it should be.”
What follows is a PowerPoint
slide show of Aimee’s photographic journal of our endeavors. Just click
on the link below to see the first slide. If you do not use Microsoft Internet
Explorer, you may experience some problems. We recommend you start the
slideshow from Internet Explorer. This slideshow is dedicated to Liza Jane and
Cocoa, two old dogs, mother and daughter, who saw us through the worst and then
had to go. They are buried close to each other and the house.
[1] Mick Womersley
is Assistant Professor of Human Ecology at Unity College in Maine. Aimee
Phillippi is a doctoral candidate in Marine Biology at the University of
Maine’s Darling Marine Center.