Category: Natural Building

Amazing Timberframe Strawbale House with Castle-like Interior

This amazing strawbale house located at Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage is one of my favorites in the village. There is so much to it and the design is so unique. It features beautiful timberframe with strawbale for wall structure and insulation. Lime plaster exterior and earthen interior makes for a pleasant aesthetic and some natural organic shapes. The earthen plaster interior and framing have been designed in places to create an almost castle-like look in some of the rooms. The earthen plaster interior walls are inlaid in places with glass shard mosaics.

But not only does the house have a unique beauty, it has many sustainable systems for providing for basic needs like running hot water from a cook stove or evacuated solar tubes, radiant floor heating, rainwater catchment, wood and passive solar heating.

#StrawbaleBuilding #NaturalBuilding #SustainableLiving

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What Happened to This Lime Plaster Job? And How I Fixed It

How do you fix lime plaster gone wrong? Early in the building of Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage, when strawbale building was a budding technology, people tried some experimental stuff. Well, to be honest, people are often experimenting because not everyone that builds their first house has all the knowledge they need to do it right the first time. We all make mistakes, and the combining of earthen and lime plasters on strawbale exterior walls was one of those experiments that failed. In this video I show you what happens when you put lime plaster on top of earthen, and how it can be repaired to make a long lasting wall surface.

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What Happens When You Use Frozen Lime Putty in Lime Plaster?

This fall I started a little home improvement project on the Timberframe building at Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage. The house had originally been plastered with earthen plaster on strawbale and lime plaster on top of the earthen plaster. This didn’t work so well and over the years the lime plaster has been cracking and peeling off the undercoat. I’d planned to buy all new lime for the project but then I found a barrel full of old slaked lime putty. This had been left out for many years and experience freezing and thawing many times.

I wondered, can you still use frozen lime putty? People around Dancing Rabbit had always spread the rumor that frozen lime putty was no good because it’s chemical structure had changed through the freezing. But I looked it up online and found that that isn’t true. So I decided to make use of that lime putty and redo part of the wall with it. How did it turn out? Watch the video.

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Earthen Floor Destroyed and Rebuilt, Start to Finish | Almost No Talking

I already posted a few videos of this process, but this is the whole process in one video with no explanation, just showing the process. This includes footage not seen in the other videos. This is more like infotainment.

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Finishing My Earthen Floor Redo | Resurfacing and Protecting

This is the final installment of my earthen floor redo. In this video we see how the final floor turned out. I reused the old floor material for most of the floor, but for this last surface layer mixed up a whole new batch of fresh plaster. Once the layer dried thoroughly I applied linseed oil.

Linseed oil will act as a protector because the oil can dry and solidify, making a traffic proof smooth floor for everyday living. If you do it right, you will have a surface that you can walk on and use like you would any other hard floor, but it has the feel of something softer, like cork.

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Redoing An Earthen Floor | Part 2 Perlite Insulation

Redoing my earthen floor was a major project last fall. But the great thing about natural building is that you just add water to the old floor material and use it to make the new one. But this was still quite a project. Last video I discovered that my light clay straw insulation had disintegrated and turned to compost, so this time I insulated with perlite.

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