Crafting Home

Many years ago I began reading books by David Spangler.  His writings about the spiritual nature of the world excited me.  A few years back our paths crossed and I renewed my interest in his writings.  We’ve had a number of conversations since and he recently (2008) published a short book entitled: Crafting Home-Generating the Sacred. It’s influenced my thinking about home building.  In it he writes:

“Home is a state in which life and wholeness are fostered and nourished. A dwelling place is one expression of that, a place where we can feel safe and upheld, able to be ourselves, …”

Crafting a home is the act of creating a dwelling in which we feel safe.  A home which holds and supports us.

How often do we consider our homes as holding and supporting ourselves and our families?  We think of them as containing our personal possessions, from our cars to our toothbrushes.  But my house doesn’t puts its walls around me when I walk in the door.  How do I feel then, when I close the door and step into my home?  Do I take the time to notice?  As I step into my own house, there’s often a sense of relaxation.  Sometimes I first need to change out of my work clothes, but then I know that I’m home and I can drop many of the issues that confronted me during my day.

I’m fortunate because I can go home each evening.  I’m not traveling and staying in motels nor am I homeless.  But what if I was?  What are the supporting functions that would be gone from my life.  Some are obvious: no walls, no roof then I’m vulnerable to the weather–cold, hot, snow, rain.  But thinking about my life, where do I sleep, eat, excrete, make love, bathe, listen to music, read, watch TV, meditate, brush my teeth?  On the whole our homes support practically every function that enhances the well being of our life and that of our family.  In a very real way my life is held together by having a home.

I want to examine this quality of holding more closely.  Again quoting from Crafting Home:

“At its most basic level, Home as a quality is this quality of Holding; it is a fundamental (quality of) space. …

Holding also actively allows and creates the conditions for an activity to take place.  Holding makes space come alive. It is the difference, for instance, between a house and a home.”

Often we consider holding as a passive activity, like a cup holds our coffee.  But thinking more about the quality of holding shows that it has an active quality.  When I hold a friend in high esteem, I value and honor our friendship.  My thoughts and feelings towards my friend are actively caring and considering them.  When I engage my thoughts, feelings and body in crafting a space for a home, I am honoring a dwelling.  I am holding this space, this house, and imbuing it with the potential of becoming a home.

It is a home that holds us–supports us.  A house can keep the rain off our heads but a home has the power to nurture us.  A home allows a family to grow, to share and expand their lives.  A home is where the art of our lives can unfold.  When we paint our dreams on the canvass of our life, our home is the frame that holds that canvass.  From our homes, our life radiates out to our professions,
our schooling, our friendships, our neighbors.

The support of a home comes from not just the walls of the house but from our hearts dwelling within it.  We fashion our home as much as from the love, care and consideration that we give to it and to the people with whom we share it, as from the materials from which it’s built and the objects with which we furnish it.

When I read David Spangler’s writing:

“Home is a space that holds us in our sacredness and allows that sacredness to unfold in appropriate ways, … ”

I recognize that each of us has a greater potential to craft a place we call home.

About a year ago, after some reflection, I decided to consider myself a home crafter. I’ve built and remodeled homes for nearly 40 years. Throughout that time my business has undergone many permutations. I have specialized in installing solar hot water systems and passive sunrooms; remodeled many bathrooms, kitchens,bedrooms, basements, etc. I even developed building products and sold them to other contractors. But throughout that time, I have rarely reflected on the quality of life that skilled person can bring to materials that he works with. What do I mean by that? First a little background.

My shift to home crafting began about seven years ago after my wife and I bought nine beautiful acres in the foothills of the Cascade mountains near Portland, OR. I finally found the land on which I could build myself a new home. Partially wooded, it has a lake with a large salmon bearing creek running through it. Shortly afterwards, I encountered Robert and Paula Baker Laporte’s concept of the Econest.

An Econest Timber Frame with Clay Plaster Walls

Based on construction concepts from Europe and Japan, an Econest is a timber frame building with a wall infill made from straw mixed with wet clay. The interior walls are typically plastered with clay or lime plaster. It is a very traditional method and there are numerous European buildings that are centuries old.

I was fortunate to find a local banker that supported my project and a building department that was a little confused by the the concept but approved my plans. Since I was doing a significant amount of the work myself and I needed to work also, our house took over two years to build. I often worked late into the evening and would gaze up at the central posts rising to a height over two stories. They felt like the trunks of trees with the knee braces with knee braces jutting out as branches. I began to feel the house–the quality of the materials like the clay that was dug from an adjacent hillside that formed the base coat of plaster in the walls. Working alone at night I ‘felt’ the patterns in the boards that made up the stairway.

A Timber Frame Econest in Northwest Oregon

Board by board, wall by wall a home was being ‘birthed’. I’d never thought about building that way. Yes, I did feel that good workmanship and good materials made for a good quality building project–attractive, durable and usually profitable. But a building becoming alive–that was um… far out. I’m a somewhat far out guy, but this was further out than I normally go. Yet the ‘aliveness’ of the building was palpable. And this was not just my opinion. Because we built a very green, sustainable home and non-toxic home, we were the subject of newspaper and TV stories. I remember a TV crew was here one day and the reporter commented on how alive and refreshing our home felt–a comment I was to hear many times during the next couple of years, as we conducted tours of our home.

In our culture we do not consider inanimate material to be alive. We have a fairly strict definition of life. It either moves or grows and reproduces forms similar to itself. And life forms generally due that by themselves without any intervention by the human race. But indigenous people had a broader definition of life–they considered all matter to be alive–rocks as well as rabbits. The consciousness was different but aliveness was an inherent property of all matter. I was exposed to these ideas in a course I took at Oregon State University entitled The Ecosystem Science of the Pacific NW Indians. (I decided to finish my undergraduate degree back in the 90′s but that’s another story.) At the time it was more of an intellectual concept. Yet, it primed my mental pump and stimulated my brain to consider a non-conventional view of the definition of life.

During the planning phase for our home, my wife and I read Christopher Alexander et al.’s well known architectural work A Pattern Language.  We incorporated a number of the books concepts into the design of our home and  found the book’s philosophy fascinating.  A few years ago, I encountered Alexander’s latest work The Nature Of Order. This four volume series is no graphic novel.  I’m still reading it.  But he begins in the first volume The Phenomenon Of Life to discuss:

“The need for a broader and more adequate definition of life” where “Each stone, rafter, and piece of concrete has some degree of life.”

“And what I mean, in general, is that every single part of the matter-space continuum has life in some degree, with some parts having very much less, and other having very much more.”

Here was a renowned architect speaking a language that sang to my heart and spoke to my head.  After all of these years of working on peoples homes, I could envision my profession in a new creative way.  I could ask question in a new way about the designs, the materials and the methods of work on a project.

For instance why have I heard so many times that new tract housing has “no soul”.   Why is the spark of aliveness missing in those projects?  Does wallboard ‘feel’ different than plaster?  If so, why?  How do I ‘feel’ when you work on a particular project and why.

Before you condemn this touchy-feelly stuff, remember that if people do not ‘feel’ OK with a project, it may impact the quality of the work, relations with the customer,etc.; or in other words the bottom line.  And to verify my ‘feeling’ about a project, I will often ask my subs how they feel about a particular house when they are working on it, especially, if the ‘vibe’ feels off to me.  There impressions are usually consistent with mine.

I choose the word crafting over building because its connotation implies a greater level of caring.  It’s a more holistic method of creating a structure that acknowledges that in putting more care into what we build we enhance the ‘life’ of the building.  It encompasses quality workmanship, choice of quality materials and a recognition that those materials and the workmanship will affect the well being of our clients.

The life of a building is a subtle almost intangible quality of a structure.  And yet, most of us know it when we feel it.

I first met Sukita Crimmel about  6 years ago when I was building my home-the first permitted and bank financed clay-straw insulated home in Oregon.  Her passion is natural building and we’ve worked since on other projects.  Her specialty is earthen floors and her work was featured in the NY Times. This spring she asked, if she could hold a ‘mud floor’ workshop this summer in a small cabin I’m building behind our house.  I leaped at the idea.

When we built our home, I wanted to have an earthen floor in one of our rooms.  Unfortunately, my engineer nixed the idea for structural reasons.  Now I could have an earthen floor in my cabin.  Though normally the floor is one of the last items installed, I wanted to go ahead now.

My cabin is small—12’ x 16’—but has long history.  We lived in a very small house before we built our home.  I wanted a “man cave” but knew we were moving in a couple of years. So, I constructed 2 x 4 wall panels with T1-11 sheathing.  I screwed the panels together to form the walls and attached the rafters with screws and

Cabin Without Doors And Windows Installed

brackets.  Everything was fastened with screws including the flooring and sheathing.  The roofing was a heavy tarp.  The interior walls and vaulted ceiling were painters drop clothes stapled to the studs.  I even hung pictures on the walls.  When we moved I unscrewed everything, hauled it to our home site and stacked it under more tarps.  It sat there, deteriorating slowly, until my crew and I rebuilt it.

Before she could hold her workshop I needed to do the ground work.  There was additional fill needed to level the area.  The stem wall required insulation.  I planned to have radiant floor heat and needed some type of insulation under the floor.  I also had to install the PEX (crossed linked polyethylene) tubing for the floor heat.

The fill was no problem.  My teenage son and friends loaded a pile of mixed gravel and dirt left over from the septic system installation into the space.  I had scraps of 3” XPS (extruded polystyrene) foam (R=15) insulation left over from building the house that worked well to insulate the stem wall.

Preparing the base for an earthen floor.

The floor insulation was a different story.  Though I had several sheets of 2” XPS (R=10) lying around, I was reluctant to use it.  The blowing agents used in the production of XPS are toxic and contribute to climate change.

I consulted with Sukita.  She tried loose perlite but found it difficult to work with because it was too ‘squishy’.  My next idea was white pumice which has an R value of approximately 1.5.   An air-filled volcanic rock commonly found in the Northwest, it is available at garden centers but the size sold is 3/8″ and smaller.  Too small—’squishy’ again.  My local garden center did have red volcanic rock similar to pumice.

Volcanic Pumice-like Rock

At 1″ to 3/4″ in size and with sharp edges it packs well and provides a good substructure for the earthen floor.  Assuming a R-value slightly less than pumice my 2″+ to 3″ of red rock base should have a R-value of 3 to 4.  That’s equivalent in value to about 1″ of EPS (expanded polystyrene) foam insulation.  I’m fine with the low values for this project because it will see limited use in the winter.

The red rock is one of many layers of my floor.  The deepest layer is “drain rock”– 1” to 2” gravel left over from my foundation drainage.  It provides a capillary break to prevent ground moisture from wicking up from the earth.  Next is a laver of gravel and dirt—the bottom of the gravel pile.  I tamped all of that with a motorized plate tamper.  The next layer in this ‘lasagna’ floor is the 6 mil polyethylene vapor barrier.  I used two layers of ‘poly’ because the red rock is sharp.  A bed of sand over the ‘poly’ is a good idea but I did not have enough depth .

Red Volcanic Insulation

Next I installed and tamped the insulating red rock.  Final layer before the tubing was some cast away filter fabric I’d saved.  It prevented the earthen floor mix from settling into the insulation rock.

PEX tubing will not lay flat in a floor.  It needs to be firmly fastened to a substrate.  One simple way is to use 6” welded wire mesh.  It is used for reinforcing concrete slabs.  Though available in rolls, it is much easier to use flat sheets which are 42” x 84”.  The tubing is attached to the wire mesh with concrete rebar ties at 12” to 18” spacing.  There’s a special little tool for twisting these ties and the process is quite quick once you get the hang of it.  I installed the tubing in a serpentine

Radiant Floor Tubing Is Attached To Concrete Wire Mesh

pattern with the tubes spaced about 1’ apart.

You do not want any joints in the floor.  The final step is to pressurize the PEX to about 100 psi and keep it pressurized until you’re ready to connect it.  This assures that there are no initial leaks and that none occur during the pour.

Tubing Is Pressurized

I’m ready for the first phase of the workshop, pouring the base coat of earthen floor.

Back In The Day-in this case sometime in the mid 80′s, Alex Wilson announced the a new publication Environmental Building News at a New England Solar Energy Association convention.  I remember that from the beginning, it was to be subscription based and accept no advertising so that their article on building products, methods, etc. would not be biased by advertisers.  It remains so to this day.  Unfortunately, the subscription price is hefty for a small contractor and I’ve only subscribed for a few years during the past decades.

But the articles are a good source of information and ask questions that need asking.  Sometimes an article or some portion of it is public.  I came across a recent post by Alex Wilson’s blog in The Green Building Advisor that looks at the contribution to greenhouse gases by foam insulation vs the amount of greenhouse gases reduced due to less heating fuel consumption.  The article, Avoiding the Global Warming Impact of Insulation basically says avoid blown-in closed cell foams and extruded polystyrene sheets (XPS).  Why?  The culprit is the blowing agent–the gas that makes all of the air bubbles in the plastic that makes it such a good insulator.   This gas, a hydrofluorocarbon, has greater capacity to trap heat than carbon dioxide.  How much?  A whole lot–about 1,430 times as much as CO2.

Though there are some questions as to actual amount of out-gassing of the blowing agent and the specific blowing agent used (manufacturers like DOW–think “blueboard”–consider the blowing agent proprietary), there’s enough information to make a good educated guess.  The article makes a good case and I suggest to anyone, who is using foam.  By the way expanded polystyrene (EPS) is much more benign and a builder friend here in Portland has found a good source at reasonable prices of high density EPS.

For years, I’ve felt that insulation materials and methods are one of the single biggest challenges that we have in the building industry.  There are health issues, installation problems, moisture problems and finding competent installers.  Lots of materials for further posts.

Foaming Exterior Siding

I’m increasing fascinated by what is being tried in order to reduce our homes energy use. It’s good to try new ideas. But as an old curmudgeon, I don’t thing a lot of them will stand the test of time. At least a number of the projects that I but during my exuberant youth are not. Here’s one that was very professionally done, well thought out at least design wise but which doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. See it in the Green Building Advisor: “Brand New Appearance and Performance for An Older Duplex”

Check out the Conversation too.

Why some paints with low VOC’s are not healthy. From The  Journal of Light Construction

How Green Are Low-VOC Paints?  “The EPA concedes that paints that meet its definition of “low-VOC” or even “no-VOC” can actually contain toxic organic compounds and …other toxic ingredients.

As builders and homeowners, we rely on well known criterion to choose materials for the homes that we build and live in. What we often are not aware of is the industry standards that define these criterion. I recently learned that paints with low VOC or even no-VOC ratings may still be toxic. When most paints were still solvent-based (think mineral spirits), VOC’s or volatile organic compounds were a significant factor in air pollution. The EPA developed a standard to measure organic compounds in oil based paints and limited their amount. Unfortunately, as manufacturers have switched to water based paints the testing procedure has not changed. Harmful compounds such as formaldehyde may still be in the paint but are not considered in the VOC testing.

The other major factor in the VOC content of paints are the tinting colors. Many manufacturers continue to use solvent based tints. These can double the VOC content of a paint. For more information check out this link: JLC Report-How Green Are Low VOC Paints?