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from Natural Life magazine,
September/October 2009
The divorce has put me into a tiny apartment where I’ve lived for almost half a year with my two small children until we just can’t stand being so cramped; anything and any place will be better than this, we say. Just around the corner, on San Rafael Avenue, is an aged two-storey house that has sat uninhabited for almost a year with a For Sale sign, cracked windows, dying grass, peeling stucco and ugly paint…but, when I inquire about it, I discover it fits my tiny-affordability price range and at 1,800 square feet certainly is bigger than the apartment. So we do it. I sign the paperwork, clear out the worst of the dusty carpets and we move in. I’ll never forget that first night in the house. My two sons go to sleep early, so I prowl through the place and compile my to-do list…then I sit alone in the living room wondering: So how exactly does one deal with an old house? What to do with essentially no insulation in the walls and windows that leak badly? How about the sag in the roof and no insulation up there either? What should I do with the local gas company’s records sitting here in front of me that show it cost hundreds of dollars each month last winter to heat and hundreds more dollars per month this past summer to cool? And then there’s need for a completely new grid of electrical wiring throughout the place, which will mean tearing out all the sheetrock to put the new wires in, then patching everything! And how to do it all with so little money available?
My mind turns back in time. I founded a company eight years earlier that specializes in straw bale construction and by now I’ve built dozens of both houses and walls using bales. The ad- vantages are well-known to me: I’ve made uniquely-beautiful privacy walls out of it and my old 2,400 square foot bale home (now lost to the divorce) had monthly winter heating bills as low as twenty dollars – and no need for cooling in the summer. I am wildly enthusiastic about straw’s potential. But more importantly, I realize, the process of practically inventing a new building method is forcing me to think differently, very differently, about this whole concept of construction. On that first night, sitting quietly in my newly-acquired old house and confronted with a long list of seeming impossibilities, I promise myself I’m going to use straw to make this house – this house which no one but crazy me seems to want to buy – into a thing of beauty. And more energy-efficient. And more valuable. And, I also promise, I’m going to think completely differently about how to do it. The walls desperately need insulating and the stucco needs repairing. Putting straw bales against the walls should solve both problems – and although I don’t yet know how, I’ll somehow figure that part out. But first, I ponder the idea of rewiring the house from the outside. That means I won’t have to tear out all interior sheetrock and then patch it, but instead I can just punch through the walls wherever I want an outlet or switch – and then I’ll cover the wires with bales! We go to work, an electrician-friend and I, and are amazed how easy it is: no drilling through countless two-by-fours . . . To read the rest of this article, subscribe to Natural Life's digital edition, which includes access to this and other back issues. Although the majority of author Cadmon Whitty’s work is in the southwestern U.S. – he lives in Albuquerque New Mexico – he was born in South America and spent the first two decades of his life in Paraguay, in England and on the U.S. East Coast. He joined a construction crew in 1980 and learned conventional methods, but soon became interested in alternative building, which can be more environmentally-friendly and often much less expensive. He spent time in several developing countries working with such alternatives and in the early 1990s relocated to New Mexico to continue the process. He is a founding member of the New Mexico Straw Bale Construction Association, participated in the initial laboratory experiments that tested the structural abilities of straw, formed Paja Construction, Inc. (‘paja’ meaning straw in Spanish), pioneered a variety of methods for building with straw and began leading quarterly workshops. In addition to having built over sixty houses and hundreds of walls, Cadmon has given workshops on straw projects across the U.S. and in Mexico and Canada. For comments on this article or questions about straw bale construction, he can be reached at 505-306-2529, by email at cadmonwhit@aol.com or via his website www.pajaconstruction.com. |
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It all started ten years ago on San Rafael Avenue. 
