Mold was the last straw for this 'innovative' house

Minneapolis Star-Tribune ^ | May 10, 2003 | Steve Brandt

[sarcasm]

What makes it heartbreaking, people say, is how eagerly Sherri Simmons looked forward to moving into the new farmhouse-style house just off Lake Street in Minneapolis.

"I've been excited from beginning to end," she said in 1998 as the house neared completion.

[Gorzaloon]

Hot diggity damn! I'm getting out of the engineering business and going into the gubermint funded construction business. Here's a few of the proposals I'm submitting Monday.

...

All glass houses to be built on the San Andreas earthquake fault in California.

Great Idea! Why not build a solar power station that uses hundreds of glass heliostat mirrors in a place that has thunderstorms with big hailstones...

Ooops never mind.

[F-117A]

Just remember, this house is symbolic of what these volk and their ilk are doing to our country!

[SamAdams76]

Straw is for barns. This is the way to insulate a house...

[Miles Bennel]

[Paleo Conservative]

All that's left is her mortgage and a junk-strewn vacant lot. She still owes at least $60,000.

Well that ought to discourage others. What bank would want to finance such a monstrosity.

[Blueflag]

Or, just live below the Mason-Dixon line in a reasonable climate with friendly people. 2X4 walls with foam, fiberglass and Tyvek is ALL you need for a comfy affordable home.

p.s. My other home is a real log home with 8" walls and 10" of compresed insulation in the roof.

Nice and toasty.

[SouthernFreebird]

Yep....my Dee-luxe doublewide looks pretty good about now.

[Copernicus]

This is a real shame. There are 10,000 innovative ways to build houses faster, better, cheaper and more efficiently.

9,990 are banned by either the so-called "Uniform Building Code" or various zoning ordinances or other inane environmental or legislated mandates.

The remaining ten options are the domain of some of the nuttiest, fruitest elements of society who also happen to somehow gain access to bottomless pools of public money.

Their misbegotten efforts give all innovative construction a bad name.

Straw, as a building material, for example, is not an unsound choice. The English Thatched Roof,for example, can last as long or longer than some contemporary choices-asphalt shingles or even some variations of standing seam metal roofs.

Unfortunately, what the envirowhackos don't seem to realize is there is as much skill,experience and training required to assemble a proper thatched roof as is required for a conventional "high tech" roof.

Once again, government is the impediment, not the solution.

Best regards,

[Mamzelle]

re: Reminded me of Frank Lloyd Wright houses. He was a genius, but his roofs always leak. )))

Almost all of them leak, and not only that--his cantilevered decks won't stay up anymore without reinforcing them. "Falling Water" has a new network of steel supports that have seriously uglified the structure. "Falling concrete..."

And the furniture he had made to complete the interiors is generally miserably uncomfortable.

I dunno--is it brilliant to create beautiful failures? His creations are lovely to see--but aren't they really unlivable? The first obligation of a builder is to keep out the elements and withstand time...Wright hasn't done either...

You can see modern inflence in many uncomfortable houses. The vaulted ceilings that sap the heat away from the bottom, making most vaulted rooms cold in winter. And the prodigious use of glass overheats the rooms in summer (idiots always point gather the western sun--sunsets and all...). Not to mention the bleaching effect of all that glare, and trying to keep that glass clean. I watch the MacMansions made of glass go up on the lakefronts, only to see awnings and shades applied immediately after finishing. Got to keep all that wonderful light out after spending a million to bring all that wonderful light *in*... And the window-washers make a fortunes.

Anyway, rant off.

[Rebelbase]

"They are BIG proponents of "natural" materials for homebuilding"

The use of "natural" reminded me of an ad for vinyl siding I read the other day:

"Natural white vinyl"

I've seen it more than once in print, so its no longer funny to me....im waiting to see "organic vinyl" for my next laugh.

[Mamzelle]

Straw-home theory is sound if done by the experienced and sensible--worth some attention, but this one crassly mismanaged effort will set it back for the duration. Aren't most of these homes built in the dry southwest, combined with adobe techniques? One home I read about was marvelously cool in the desert, with adobe in and out, dry straw in between, walls almost two feet thick. Imagine the window-sills and window-seats.

[Katya]

Visitors recall seeing power tools being charged with solar cells, and rain soaking into straw bales. Jim Buesing said he had a gut feeling that although the crew was strong on enthusiasm, there were complications from weaving together alternate building techniques.

The answer is the idiots trying to build this. You are right, that this is an ancient technique. I have a neighbor who's built quite a luxurious bale building. They have wonderful deep sills and the temperature stability is amazing. Hay bale built properly has no fire risk, as there is little air for combustion. The riskiest time for fire is while building the structure. Obviously they didn't take the damaging rain into account either.

[Publius6961]

The most enthusiastic greenies are dumber than rocks.
Seems to be an inverse relationship between stridency and knowlege.

Been that way since they discovered the word "environment" 40 years ago.

[winner3000]

(The big story here is how a gov't subsidised project with volunteer labor cost $200,000 for a end product and the end product was defective. It would have cost $95,000 to $125,000 had it been done by the private sector firm by someone who had worked the bugs out & was specialized in that form of construction.)

The problem here obviously is that the government didn't spend enough money on it (parody of liberals defending every failed government run failure such as public schools).

[Thommas]

All that's left is her mortgage and a junk-strewn vacant lot. She still owes at least $60,000.

Well that ought to discourage others. What bank would want to finance such a monstrosity.

Sadly, the bank is forced to finance this and other low-income poroperty loans. Remember back in the early '90's when banks were accused of discrimination by not giving housing loans to low-income, non-traditional family, part-time employed folk of the various victim classes? It just wasn't fair that adequately employed, good credit , median income white folk got loans that were unavailable to the afore mentioned classes.

The result was Robert Reich and the Clinton administration forcing banks and lending institutes to lend to what would otherwise be less than credit worthy people. Public funds being routed for these projects were then supplemented with banks private (yours and mine) funds. Note how Ms. Simmons quickly leveraged her new home to purchase other properties, a tactic she undoubtably learned in her Homeowner's Education class.

The rot in this project is more pervasive than just in the condemned home.

[capt. norm]

They obviously forgot the painful lesson of "The Three Little Pigs"

I guess they thought it was just some silly fairy tale.

[NewMexLurker]

I've seen several straw bale homes being built here in the desert southwest, and it can be a successful building technique out here, if it's done right. It is critical to use bales that are very dry and very tightly baled (wired together). Loose straw is never used for anything. You have to protect the bales from moisture, both during the building process and after. A thick coat of stucco is usually used as the final protective coat, and is often applied both inside and out. You have to end up with the bales being absolutely protected from moisture.

It looks like these people made a number of mistakes when building their home. Loose straw in the attic or anywhere else is asking for trouble, and pouring a slab over hay bales sounds downright nutty. The location doesn't sound too good for a straw bale home either. I might consider building a straw bale home here in New Mexico, but I don't think I'd do it in a higher humidity place.

Another mistake I bet was made on this house was treating its construction like a political statement. Too often when a straw bale house is going up, it gets treated like some kind of Green Party political event. Volunteers show up and work for free, just to make some kind of point. I wouldn't want to live in a house that was built using traditional materials, if the builders were a bunch of untrained fruitcakes.

[Chancellor Palpatine]

If I remember right, its those flat roofs. No mater how diligently the thing is sealed, there will always be some water to find its way in. You could do it with a lightly graded slope, worked with the design to present the illusion of being flat.

Of course, as one of those owners of vaulted rooms with megawindows, I can testify as to the coldness in the winter if a fire isn't burning, LOL.

[PA Engineer]

The style you are talking about is an Envelope home. My wife and I lived for a year in Rapid City, South Dakota where we rented one of these homes.

The home had a two floor south facing sun room, one wood stove and about 3KW of resistive heat. It worked like a charm and was very impressive. The design is suppose to take advantage of passive ground-loop heating and cooling in combination with super insulation (R60 ceiling and R40 walls - all glass wool). Rapid City has only two seasons (July and winter) and with the plentiful sunlight the home was very comfortable.

I could find very few papers on this type of construction, hence I do not know how applicable it is to other regions of the country.

[Willie Green]

All that's left is her mortgage and a junk-strewn vacant lot. She still owes at least $60,000.

What's really amazing is that the bank was willing to approve a mortgage on a compost heap.