Since I have an opportunity to rewrite our history, I think I'll start from the very beginning...because we get asked a lot about why we decided to build a straw bale house.
We were casting about for retirement ideas...do we go south? Away from the cold, Michigan weather? But away from our kids, friends, and family? And away from the MSU Spartans, Don's passion? In the end, the decision was to stay in Michigan, and actually move closer to Lansing where basketball and football games would be easily accessible.
I pictured a small house with a small yard, within walking distance of the stadiums and shopping along Grand River...but that was not to be...Don wanted to be a farmer, a far different sort of man than the one I lived with in Royal Oak...who just loved walking downtown and ogling all of the young women who were drawn to the bars and restaurants there. A farmer? Really? What the heck? I liked gardening, an acre might be nice...
And what would we live in? An old farm house? A log cabin? We started looking at properties in the area, both with and without homes...this was before prices went downhill (our timing has never been the greatest). Around that time, we saw an article in the paper about stawbale homes. We read about how energy efficient they are and decided that more research needed to be done. Books were bought, the interenet was searched, and we found out that in 2006, the bienniel International Straw Bale Conference was being held at Camp Kawartha, Lakefield, Ontario, just north of Toronto, and signed up to go. In the meantime, we helped in the building of the Kid's Cottage at Kensington park, one wall of which is strawbale. I think Don was already hooked on the notion of building his own home...but I got hooked at Kensington and the conference...these were my people...environmentalists, some of whom were living completely off the grid! But were we brave enough to try something like building one's own home? Could Don and I get along well enough to make all the decisions that need to be made? Only time would tell....
