Strawbale 'wrap'

During an unexpected, and mostly unwelcome, morning at home, I have managed to come across a couple of useful bits of information online:

I received an invitation via Barbara Jones of Straw Works to a volunteer week in Bridport helping with a conversion of an old bugalow with a straw-bale 'wrap' (cladding) and a load-bearing straw bale extension. The project's blog is at thewoodlouse.blogspot.co.uk. It would be great to go to join in, both because it's just what we want to do in OrchardyHaven and because I spend many happy days as a child in Bridport, but we'll be away...

Then I came across Kuba Wihan's name again, as the leader of the volunteer week, from Straw Works. I did a little research into who he was and found his website www.jakubwihan.com where there is another great looking project where an old building was wrapped in straw bales for insulation (see this link and also the pdf of pictures here).

Earth Hands and Houses

We're looking forward to meeting a couple of local straw bale builders when we go to Poland this summer. We've booked a place on the clay plastering workshop in Przelomka, 27-29 July, and we may go on the lime plastering workshop afterwards too... If you're interested, there's more info at the bottom of this page.

Paulina built the first straw bale house in North East Poland (as far as we know), and we have a small personal connection because we spent the first night of our honeymoon in the little house in Przelomka.

The first straw house in Przelomka 

I was there :)

We'll be interested to meet Paulina and Jarema, to practice some clay plastering and to find out more about the realities of building with straw in Poland and working with the local planners and building regulations.

And who knows, maybe one of the future workshops will be here at Orchardy Haven...

What is Orchardy Haven?

This is an important thing that I've been needing to write down for a long time, and Phil and Andrew kept on asking for a concise description. Well here is draft one, and this is about as concise as it can be for now - it may get simpler later. Any comments appreciated.

Orchardy Haven is an experiment in sustainable and eco-friendly living and learning. It is an 8ha neglected old farm in north east Poland, purchased in September 2011. There are several aspects to the project:

1. To convert the dilapidated farm house to an eco-house.
2. To grow food and other useful crops on the surrounding land using the principles of forest gardening and permaculture.
3. To involve friends and volunteers creatively in the whole process.
4. To embody a culture of open learning: we're learning, we're inviting others to learn with us, and we can teach and be taught by the people who come and interact with us.
5. To develop the barns to provide volunteer/visitor accommodation, craft workshop facilities, and to meet the needs of the farm.
6. To create a ceramics workshop and other facilities for traditional crafts.
7. To build on opportunities that come out of these activities and our other skills to provide financial sustainability for the farm and our family.

Obviously the financial sustainability of the whole thing is a big leap, but it is possible and we'll just have to have a go at it. For now we can't even afford to move there, so it's going to be a while before it's all up and running.

One question Andrew asked was whether there was a conflict between inviting volunteers to help us and trying to make a living for ourselves on the farm. We don't think that is a conflict. There are lots of organic farms that have WWOOFers, and we ourselves have been volunteering in various places where our hosts need to make a living. We think being able to volunteer on a project like this is a great opportunity and is all about sharing knowledge and experience and giving people a chance to go out and get a place of their own to farm...

Easter 2012 tourist visit...

So it's now a month since we got back and there hardly seems to have been time to spend on pleasure and future projects like posting on here. Of course it's always a pleasure spending time looking after Maia who's now 9 months old and already seems much more like a little girl than a baby - but she doesn't give us much time for extras.

Anyway, me and Andrew and Phil flew to Vilnius in Lithuania which is closer than Warsaw, plus we managed to get cheaper flights. It was great to be in Vilnius and we spent two days sightseeing - an uncommon pleasure for our visits to Poland. Part of the deal with Andrew and Phil was for them to comment on whether travelling to our rural corner of Poland could have an appeal to more ordinary travellers, and not only to keen eco-builders and permaculturists.

Phil only had a few days around OrchardyHaven but we did manage to explore the local town and library, and we went on a tour to the source of the Biebrza river and near the border of Belarus. There is all sorts of history here, and the Biebrza National Park is the biggest in Poland. The places we went aren't very touristy though - in fact it's not well set up for tourists yet...


View Our driving tour from Suchodolina in a larger map

In Lipsk we did find a well made camping and picnic area and an old bit of Polish WWII artillery over the road which pleased Phil. Then on the way back we took a detour to an agroturystyka (rural tourist accommodation) in Hamulka where they've done a great conversion of an old chata (small wooden hut) into a really comfortable place to stay. In fact we had our wedding reception in the barn there and they have other facilities for making traditional cakes called sekacz (see picture), having bonfires and rafting on the river. Click on the image or here for their website.

We also found this old ruined windmill on the way which was very photogenic:

After Phil left we explored Bialystok (the regional capital) a bit, enjoyed the traditional Easter celebrations with the family, and visited Augustow (the most touristy local town).

Despite the fact that there were no cafes to be found for many miles (except Bialystok and Augustow), Phil and Andrew both say the enjoyed their visit. It is a beautiful spot we've found, although there's a lot of work to do. I'll have more details of the work we did in my next post.

We'll be visiting again at Easter

Winter walking round Wakefield

Yay, tickets are booked and we're on our way back to our land this Easter for two weeks. Sadly the we doesn't include Kasia or Maia this time, but I do have a couple of friends coming with me so it should be a good trip anyway - we'll be looking for some live folk music!

Most of my time over the last few months has been taken up with family life. Kasia's started working Tues-Thurs (and other days sometimes) so I get to look after Maia all this time which has been great for both of us I think. I've been singing to her so much I've ended up joining a choir, the Merrie City Singers. This will be good in those dark isolated Polish winter nights when we have to create our own entertainment...

I've also been doing quite a lot of shelf building, decorating and other bits of DIY and being a handyman. Managing to pay the rent and bills at least and get some good practice in for building our new house.

A slightly more interesting project has been making some flyers and a website for an arts festival in Frome called Celebrate Women (www.celebratewomen.org.uk) for my friend Linda King.

Hopefully will get on with more research for OrchardyHaven soon and I'll post it on here.

Ecohouse lesson 2 - toilet maintenance

Apparently the seal on the toilet outlet pipe only lasts a few years. Even the best ones are only guaranteed for ten years! So potentially every time we flush a toilet more than say 8-10 years old we're letting some moisture out into our home (and let's not think about what else...)

So the lesson is, learn to install your own toilet, and then replace the seals every 7or 8 years. Lovely. Thanks.

Ecohouse lesson 1 - Build Tight, Ventilate Right

A while back I borrowed a book called Ecohouse: A Design Guide from my friends at Pennine Camphill Community. I opened it at the beginning of the chapter on ventilation, and read:

The control of ventilation is one of the most subtle and yet the most important concerns of the building designer. How to make air move about the building in a way that satisfies, and even delights, the occupant.

I really liked this idea, and the suggestion that you should let the wind do the ventilating - and design your house around the prevailing wind conditions. I have heard however of things like the German Passivhaus standard where the house is completely sealed and airtight (and they say you can heat a whole house in the cold north for a year for £25 and the indoor air quality is excellent - there's even less dust!). So before I start thinking too carefully about ventilation it seems my first lesson is in an earlier chapter of the book, called 'Pushing the building envelope'.

Sure enough, on p.94 we read 'a sustainable building must be an airtight building'. Further:

It is apparently normal for up to 50% of the heat loss from new buildings in the UK to come from uncontrolled air leakage (Ecohouse p.92 quoting research from 2000) 

air passing through the external envelope - walls, floor and roof - of a building carries moisture with it. This causes significant damage in buildings, particularly to timber, and can substantially shorten the life of a building. 

Infiltration is the technical term ... for the uncontrolled movement of air through buildings. ... Excess air movement through infiltration:

• Makes heating systems inadequate
• Gives rise to cold draughts and discomfort
• Increases fuel bills and CO₂ emissions
• Allows potentially damaging moisture to penetrate our building fabric
• Reduces the effectiveness of insulation

The biggest pollutant we have to deal with in our dwellings is moisture - plain old H₂O. Minimising the build-up of moisture helps prevent condensation and mould growth, and discourages dust mites. ... If we have open-flued appliances, such as wood-burning stoves, we need more ventilation for safety...

Mainstream UK construction has become much more aware of airtightness over the past five years, and the latest revision to the Building Regulations (England & Wales), which came into force in April 2006, will accelerate this trend. ... Anyone interested in sustainable construction should appreciate that the targets for airtightness ... are very lax. [They] set a maximum air permeability target of 10 for all new buildings... [A]ll you have to do to meet this Building Regulations target is to build a dwelling where heated air remains inside for 7 minutes in the hour when a 20mph wind is blowing! this is neither energy-efficient nor sustainable, by a substantial margin. Hence the advanced energy standards set by the Association for Environment Conscious Building, AECB, of an air permeability of 3.0 for their silver standard and 0.75 for their gold standard. The first of these is the lowest air permeability we would recommend for naturally ventilated buildings, whilst the higher gold standard is comparable to the German Passivhaus standard...

There's a lot more in this chapter. There's a lot about insulation (use 500mm in the roof and 300mm in the walls - or 'think of a number, then double it'; insulate the roof, not the top ceiling), about cold bridges and special constructions for avoiding them (window frame designs, nylon wall ties, timber sub-frames around doors and between lintels, etc), and about condensation (ideally install a vapour barrier on the inside wall and a breather membrane on the outside).

Other notes:

• you need to really closely supervise builders if you want to eliminate air leakage as standard workmanship accounts for lots of problems (even simply dropping excess mortar inside wall cavities)...
• ...so self-build has advantages here :-)
• need to carefully construct and seal every point where a cable or pipe goes through a wall or ceiling
• draughts get in behind dry-lining, so better to apply wet plaster
• pay particular attention to insulating corners: there are illustrations that show how teperatures drop more rapidly in corners; and additionally it's harder to insulate them because of inaccessibility - need to ensure any insulation properly installed - could think about thickening walls at corners...
• use thermalite blocks between concrete floors and walls to avoid cold bridging