**I'm truly impressed that Mr Open Source Ecology & Ms Open Building Institute got married and built a house...Of course it's an open-source house that's all makered-up from straw, wood and brick from their neighborhood - Bruce Sterling — Shareable
Kelly McCartney highlights the work of Marcin Jakubowski and Catarina Mota, who decided to reinvent the home-building wheel a few years back.
For more check out the Open Building Institute and/or contribute to their Kickstarter
h/t @Bruce Sterling
2 Comments
moooooAaaar green washing.
This is stupid.
A very interesting design and knowing what I know now I woulkd also have put in an LED lighting system,however I live in a thatched property that has no guttering or dug foundations,the walls are built of cob on a rubblestone foundation and are all plastered in lime mortar with the base and the top coats blaster on using a mortar sprayer,I also have a herringboned septic tank system and would also have prefered a rainwater storage tank for my showers,washing machine and lavatory flushing system.
Due to all the different work done on the property since it's first construction in the early 1800's it has 5 different kinds of background: Cob,Brick,Rubblestone and a dense concrete block as well at the Thermalite/Duroc lightweight blockwork.
The house is built on the side of a gently sloping hill and I have a stone-lined well that used to supply all the water for the property.
It would be nice to have solar panels or a ground sourced heatpump but due to it's listed status and the fact that this is an AONB (area of outstanding natural beauty) area this is forbidden,but seeing as how there is Hinkley Point nuclear power station a few miles away and a smelly biodigester and lagoon storage facilities nearby as well as many newly built homes around here this is beyond a joke and makes a mockery of the whole stupid listed building consent which in my opinion needs a major overhaul: Just recently I did some work on a listed property in the village of Stogursey where the next door house,which was of the same age but had no listed status and the local builder was using the slightly cheaper but more costly in energy to produce,cement mortar and doing what they liked with the building inside as well as outside.If there are buildings in an area why are some listed while others are not??
I would also like to add that for the thatch I would have prefered to use the local reed but was forced (by the listing authority) to use a wheat straw which is useless as it doesn't last as long and has to be brought in from many more miles away than the reed does which grows locally 5 miles away on the levels.Reed is also excellent as a base for ceiling work and on one local house which I had to repair the mortar and lime plaster was 3 inches thick and was still going strong.
My home is cool in the summer and warm (ish) in the winter,I have no underfloor heating and during the cold spell rely entirely on a wood stove.Out of all 5 backgrounds the worst for the lime mortar is the lightweight blockwork because unless you use an hydraulic lime it won't stick to it as well as it does to the brick or the cob.
Any damp issues that I had inside were in just one place ( the concrete blockwork) but had been cleared up and are no longer an issue since I put in a French drain and tanked the inside 2 of 4 walls.The kitchen area of the house built in the 1970's of a brick wall with a cavity but no added selotex or insulation I plastered in a gypsum multi-finish plaster on top of an insulated plasterboard called Thermboard and next to that is the light-weight duroc block extension which has (in my opinion) caused the most issues.
I'm a lime plasterer and specialise in using many different types of mixes which I have applied over the years on my own home,I also have a small lime museum which is full of different old lime mortar and plaster samples and old odds and ends that I have collected over the years from the different sites that I have worked on including two of the Rothschild mansions in Buckinghamshire.
I also have different wooden panels using wood lath,the expensive hand riven oak lath the cheap machine sawn pine lath as well as elephant grass and a straw and reed panels as backgrounds.
I have also built strawbale mancaves and on one example we built a 100 square metre walls with wheat-straw bales slotted in around an oak wood frame,a single floor structure with a seagum roof.My assistant and I used a total of 14 tons of sand to make the hydraulic lime (NHL 2.0) mortar,I would have prefered to use a lime putty mortar but the clients architect insisted on the hydraulic, so after dubbing out all the bigger dips and any gaps we put on 3 coats,a 1st coat was applied straight onto the staw surface using a compressor and mortar sprayer with a hopper,we did not use any expanding metal lath,there is no need to,the straw makes a fantastic key for the hand trowelled 2nd coat. Finally a sprayed on rough-cast finish,and 7 years on,there is not a single crack in the mortar anywhere.
Cob buildings make a fantastic feature in any landscape as they have done for hundreds of years,they can easily last 100 years,are well insulated and so much cheaper to build than all the new-build properties that are designed to last around 40 years (if that),they are entirely environment friendly using locally sourced materials and use no plastic or chemicals in their construction and as I have said before lime putty uses less energy to produce than cement does and is softer and less harsh on their backgrounds than cement,their rigid equivalent binder material.
End of my rant,thankyou for reading this and happy building.
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