Green Building - Mortgage Free - Dream Home Update
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- Опубліковано 11 вер 2024
- Showing the building progress of our dreamy greeny home. We are building a 3000 sq foot dream home off the grid with mostly recycled and alternative materials. Passive solar, huge attached sun room for growing plus a small root cellar for cold storage. Vaulted ceilings in the living room with exposed 34' laminated beams and upper lofts curving around the northern exposure of the house. The crew: 1 man, 1 awesome woman, and 2 great kids!
Love your definition of "all closed in" being a couple windows in.
Another great video. Thank you. A few questions:
1 - you mention insulating the roof. What do you use for insulation as I learned from other videos that you prefer natural materials :)
2 - what kind of foundation are you using for the structure?
3 - how is the floor going to be build and insulated?
Once again thank you for sharing and congratulations for an amazing job. I can't wait to see the house finished and especially the greenhouse and all the plants in it.
***** Thank you Bartek, Re: insulating roof. We like to use Rock wool (made by Roxul). It is made from the slag from smelting steel. Completely fire proof without chemicals and will not mould as it is basically natural mineral spun into a fabric. Very readily available here in Canada and very inexpensive compared to other products.
Regarding the foundation, we live on 7.5 acres of farmland with lots of gravel. Hard to grow anything, but exceptionally stable so we built slab on grade for the greenhouse and a 1' thick x 2' grade beam for the main section of the house. We get very little ground movement with frost and not enough rain to be concerned about sinking. Normally I would recommend putting pilings in under a grade beam unless you are sure of your soil conditions.
3. The floor of the house will be insulated with a radiant Bubble/Foil product over the gravel. We'll then build a 2x8" wood structured floor and attach it to the concrete grade beam around the perimeter. The decking will be Formaldehyde free plywood. We are using in-floor radiant heating. We learned from two of our friends that cement floors and radiant heat work fine, but you can't have a fire place. One or the other but not both. This way, the wood floor heats and cools quickly so you can offset it with wood heat, In a cement floor, the cement takes a long time to heat and cool, so you also use wood heat, the rooms are always too hot, or if you turn the floor heat down, your feet are always cold with the wood heat running.
How's the house now?!? We need an update!
Congrats been following you guys for awhile. Love the videos on the SLC. You explain it very well and thoroughly. How much was it to do the floor in the greenhouse and what thickness did you pour it to and was it done professionally or did you do it? THANKS! :)
Thanks Eric, Floor on the greenhouse is 4" thick. We mixed and poured the cement by hand. I don't remember the actual cost on that pour, but it was very reasonable. The last time we worked out pricing for mixing cement we had mixed and poured 96 cu yards of cement over a 2 year period (foundation of this house plus our 1st straw bale build). The cost of us doing it worked out to be $3500. If we had trucks bring it in it would have been much faster but cost would have been $18,000. 3 bags of GU cement is about $45 + $20 gravel = $65 / yd mixed by hand. Current price of premix cement around here is $260 / yd + delivery.
Don't use the video stabilizer thingy it ruins the video
Hey Aaron, Thanks for the comment. Yeah, I really need to build myself a stabilizer for the camera. I originally posted it as it was shot raw and almost everyone in our house had the same comment - they felt sea sick by the end of the video. Sorry 'bout the stabilization. It does degrade the video, but at least no one's woofing their cookies :)
Riverstone Studios - Eco-Body Care haha that's true :) great-looking house by the way