This morning I got an email from straw bale experts Bill and Athena Steen, who are in Denmark and Finland doing clay plaster workshops. “Friland (Denmark) is a big story, a mortgage free community with lots of experimental and alternative building happening. Too much to write about, but a visit to their website will tell more: https://www.dr.dk/dr2/friland.…”

Plaster carving by Athena and workshop participants

Old house with reed roof in Feldballe, Denmark

More photos of their trip at: https://www.caneloproject.com/clay-plaster-workshop-in-denmark/#more-1545

Email we received Friday:

I wanted to write and say thanks to Lloyd Kahn and company for the Shelter series of books.

I just went through all of them again last night.

I never get tired of reading those books.

I attach a picture of our cabin in Montana.

Thanks for the inspiration.

Your Pal,

Jeremy Goers

AFMO Zigzag Ranger District

Mt. Hood National Forest

Top: nice stone work in Mill Valley. It’s starting to look like Fall. Above: seedlings with Buddha front and center at Zen Center garden at Green Gulch Farm, Calif.

In-laws, Outlaws, and Granny Flats: Your Guide To Turning One House Into Two Homes

by Mike Litchfield. Taunton Press, 2011. Paperback, 224 pp., 200 color photos, $24.95

Mike Litchfield has just written a very important book on building, not just for its subject matter, but for its timeliness in this era of tightening incomes. The subtitle says it well: “Your guide to turning one house into two homes.”

There’s a growing need for sensible and affordable shelter in North America these days, and Mike, the first editor of Fine Homebuilding, and the author of the bestselling book Renovation, has put together an immensely useful book here.

The book addresses a real need. For one (big) thing, baby boomers’ parents are aging, and a cottage in the yard or an apartment above the garage beats a rest home or a retirement condo in both financial and human terms.

In many cases, for the cost of renting a house or apartment for a few years, or for the cost of an elder and/or loved one in a rest home, you can create a rent-free or mortgage-free home. The book covers, in this order:

1. Is an in-law right for you?

2. Design of in-laws

3. Choosing appliances, fixtures, and materials

4. Plans and permits

5. Methods of construction, and the pros and cons of each:

a. Basement units

b. Garage conversions

c. Stand-alone units

d. Bump-outs, carve-outs, and attics

6. Current sources for finding architects, green materials, and products

Read More …

There was an excellent article by Penelope Green in the NYTimes Home section yesterday

on a straw bale builder in the Catskills. Penelope writes:”Originally deployed by late 19th-century homesteaders in the Nebraska plains, straw-bale building techniques, though much refined, have essentially remained the same for the last century: hay bales are sliced into blocks, tucked into a frame and finished in plaster. (You can visit many of the early Nebraskan straw-balers, but not the first documented one, an unplastered one-room schoolhouse, because it was eaten by cows.)

Nobody paid much attention to this hardy Plains vernacular until the early 1970s, when Shelter, the building bible of budding counterculturalists, was first published. Included in its tour of zomes, yurts and treehouses was an essay on the “baled hay” houses of the Plains.”

She’s referring to the photo of a straw bale barn on page 70 of Shelter, BTW, Bill Steen, who co-authored the best seller The Straw Bale House in 1994 with his wife Athena and David A. Bainbridge, told me that this photo was what got him started with straw bale in the first place.

Click here for article: https://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/14/garden/in-the-catskills-building-stone-by-stone-bale-by-bale.html?hpw

Photo by Raeanne Giovanni-Inoue for The New York Times