SB cost and local render

[Jo Wilhelm <home_place@juno.com>]

Howdy! to the Straw Wolf , RT, and the rest of y'all! 

We just finished a workshop that put up our third SB building. We now
have a post & beam, a load bearing AND a hybrid! I wish we had better
numbers on cost, our main house (1 & 1/2 story, 1880 sq ft footprint,
1535 usable) is either at $ 55,000 or $ 58,000-- depending on which one
of us you are talking to. That brings it in between $30 and $40 a square
foot. The load bearing cabin, 20 x 25, we've got under $ 7000 in, but its
not quite finished out. The barn, is 16 x 24 and so far we have a little
over $ 2000 in it, but then there's very little in wiring and plumbing
and no finish out-- Clint already says its too much for chickens!

We (and yes, that's an editorial we!) have done a lot of the work-- most
of the two smaller buildings were done in several series of workshops. We
do not use local soil for plaster-- lets face it, we have 1/4 to maybe an
inch of leaf rot on top of rock. We haul in dirt to make garden, etc.
There are places in our area ( about 25 miles away) where there's a good
bed of clay, but its fiercely guarded AND expensive.

So we get straw as close as we can. Stonewall TX (about 50 miles away and
home to the Texas White House of LBJ days) has several grain farmers and
one of them bales the nicest oat straw bales you can imagine. We have
used his straw here on two buildings and done the stack on several other
buildings using it as well.

We have not yet been to a plaster party using earth plasters or lime
plasters. There have only been a couple in this area, (just last weekend
Frank Meyer did one out east of Austin on a unique little house that we
led the stack on last year) but unfortunately we have had conflicting
commitments and could not attend.

So, we use cement stucco. Certainly the greatest expense we hired out on
our big house was the stucco. The numbers quoted in the "36 reasons" were
below what it goes for here. However, we had no stucco experience when we
built this house, and we have 17 bale high walls at the peak. Seemed a
reasonably good idea to hire someone who knew what they were doing!

Now, we slap mud with exuberant abandon. (For those of you who have seen
the ADRA video from China, last weekend we tried some straight hawks like
the Chinese plasterers used in the video. They look like giant ping pong
paddles. With an elongated handle, it relieved a lot of strain on my
wrist and I liked it. I was a majority of one.) We used several different
types of finish coats-- giving the interior west end of the barn a pinto
pony appearance. But it gave our participants a chance to play with some
different products. We used one luncheon discussion time to talk plasters
and we recommended Charmaine's books, the archives of this list, and a
Steen workshop as the ways to learn more about natural plasters.

I was amazed that the writer of 36 reasons was from Texas. I don't know
where he lives, but as a rule, the thing that makes adobe wonderful,
doesn't do well here. When its hot in Texas, it's hot! and it doesn't
cool off a lot at night. Rock and adobe houses are wonderful in fall,
winter and spring. However, they get warmed up in the heat of the day and
it doesn't get cool enough at night for them to recover before it gets
hot again the next day. SB has some of that problem, but not as much. Oh
well.

Enough already. Y'all come and see us now, y'hear?

JoMaMa

Jo Wilhelm 
home_place@juno.com   830/868-7077 www.the-home-place.com
Tours, workshops, seminars and speakers are all available from THE HOME
PLACE-
A sustainable living demonstration center in the hill country of central
Texas.

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