Recycling:
Strawbale and Steel
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The
House that Jack Built
This is one man's
story. Many like others he arrived in Santa Fe
during the mid-70s and fell in love with the words "solar adobe."
They were like a demi-god, and for construction, those words were the ideal,
the goal for modern living. Things have changed a bit, but not the stories
of people who jumped into making their own adobes houses. This is one story.
"Those adobe bricks weigh a ton," said Jack Pressler, sitting in
his hand-made house on the edge of the Barrio. "Actually, they weigh
40 pounds each and I lifted a ton of them."
Pressler came to Santa Fe from a little town in the mountains north of San
Diego where he owned an antique store. He was quite taken with what he calls
"the vernacular of the adobe house" and it didn't take long to get
the urge to build his own adobe house. However, he couldn't afford to buy
land and couldn't afford other housing while he built. So he looked around
for a fixer-upper.
"I had three requirements. It had to be near the plaza. It had to be
adobe. It had to be affordable," Pressler said, adding that the latter
was the biggest stumbling block. With a degree in fine arts from the Chicago
Institute, he'd landed a job at the Museum of Fine Arts. The pay was minimal.
"Qualifying for a loan was not easy. The banker suggested I put down
everything I'd ever done that brought in money. You know, the Santa Fe scramble
to make a living. I'd done house sitting and nude modeling. I'd built some
shelves for someone and sold some antiques to a shop."
With a little maneuvering, the numbers began leaning in the right direction,
and Pressler bought a small 50 year-old house on the edge of the Barrio for
$37,500. Small is maybe too big of a word for this low-ceilinged 490 square
foot hut. However, the lot was 5,000 square feet, offering plenty of room
to expand. Pressler now had his dream home, though the results were still
in his head.
Fixer-uppers often prove to be more perplexing than starting from scratch.
Surprises pop up all along the way. When Pressler took off the plaster board
in the kitchen ceiling, wanting to raise the effect, he discovered a solid
three inches of dirt had been used for insulation. The house originally had
no bathroom. When one had been installed along one wall, that wall had a window.
"I moved into a house with a window in the shower," Pressler recalled.
In the spring of 1979 he signed up for an adobe construction class in Albuquerque.
It lasted a week and covered wiring, plumbing and solar heating.
"Remember those first solar adobes and how hot they were?" he asked
rhetorically. "One woman I knew lived in a solar adobe that was definitely
warm during the winter-120 degrees. The next class I took handed out a few
rules to cut down on the heat and still gather the sun, like overhangs and
vertical windows." The class was taught by Quentin Wilson who had students
build a complete house in two weeks in Chimayo.
Pressler now felt ready to take out the shower window. He patched the space
with adobes. It worked, so the next project was a little bigger. He took off
the ceiling in the living room, exposing wooden joists and got an idea.
As antique dealer he's always in the mind-set of looking out for used materials.
The museum began remodeling and Pressler grabbed the old vigas. "They're
much better," he said, "they're dry so not as heavy and they won't
warp and twist once in place."
He cut the vigas lengthwise, bolted the halves with L brackets on to the existing
beams. Then he hired a plasterer. The result was a higher ceiling with an
old-time feel.
"And I thought, 'Hey, this construction stuff is pretty neat',"
Pressler said. The confidence moved him on to the next room. Again he came
across used vigas and bought five. He punched some holes in the outside wall
and directly across on the inside wall; then he fed the vigas through. Again,
the effect was that of an old house that had settled in place long ago.
"A lot of this is happy accident," he said, sweeping his arm through
the air, taking in the entire house. "I'd do something then stand back
amazed how it turned out. It was fun, and I'd actually started to make the
house much better."
He did a lot of the work himself, way too much he says, but at 35 he was younger
and stronger and more idealistic. He also read and talked with people and
hired jobs out on the condition he could work alongside them. "I wanted
to learn," he said.
He added insulation where he could and planned to wrap inside rooms with hallways
and other rooms because he said he didn't ever want to be cold again.
He worked on and off for years in the evenings and on weekends. Then he took
a year off and began selling cowboy boots, a hot corner of the antique market
then. From that period Pressler still has a pair of fancy colorful boots signed
by Gene Autry.
"I made a lot of money, enough to almost finish the house," he said
then quipped, "This is the house that boots built."
Time came to do the serious expansion. He divided the work into two phases.
Phase one would be the formal dining room; phase two redoing the roof. "I
wanted to do it right and had every phases inspected. I know lots of people
who try to by-pass the inspectors, but I saw them as people who could help
me build correctly and achieve what I wanted to achieve."
He dug the foundation himself. He bought the adobe bricks, but laid them himself,
lifting buckets of mortar up on scaffolding as the walls grew higher. He found
more abandoned vigas, old lintels. He bought solid wooden doors from an old
hotel being remodeled.
"I didn't want to scrimp in the electricity or the plumbing," Pressler
said, "so I hired that out."
When it came to the roof, he went from flat to pitched. When it came to adding
the bedroom and an extra room, it required clearing trees. And he found more
vigas at a garage sale. He tallied up the cost and it came to $42 a square
foot, tripling the original size.
Today, portions of the house still need work, and he has plans for a better
kitchen but the house is livable. It feels good. The ambience is a tone like
someone cared. There is a story in every corner, every fireplace, certainly
every viga.
"I'd do something until I got it right," Pressler said. And that's
the way this house feels. Like it was done right with all the ingredients
to truly be a Santa Fe adobe.
Recycling:
Strawbale and Steel
Using
strawbales for housing isn't anything new in the world of construction. The
Nebraska homesteaders began using straw as a building material over a century
ago. In Europe people have used straw for several centuries. And, of course,
one of the three little pigs used straw for his house. It's nothing new. But
building with straw and steel is new.
"It's not the combination you instinctively think of," said Tony
Perry, as he walked through one of his houses under construction in Bernalillo.
"You usually don't think of straw and steel as being compatible, but
the houses are strong and well insulated."
And the combination is much better for the planet. Thousands of bales of straw
go unused each year and Perry said 86 percent of steel is recycled. He chose
using steel because it just made sense.
"I'd rather use a recycled Ford than a new tree," he said.
Perry's background is in advertising and consulting. He worked on both sides
of the Atlantic helping businesses establish themselves in the United States
and Europe. He retired in 1986 and moved to Santa Fe in 1989. His late wife
began working with the Community Housing Authority and became concerned about
the cost of building. She felt the affordable housing wasn't really affordable
and somewhere along the way Perry got involved.
He grew up in England and says every so often he needs to go back and "nurture
his accent." On one of those trips he looked into strawbale housing in
Europe. He got fired up, came back to Santa Fe and applied for a small business
innovation grant to research the most efficient and low-cost building method.
He is now one of the region's leaders in strawbale construction.
"I got involved with the state's Construction Industry Division and began
putting together the strawbale code," said Perry. Danny Bock of Living
Structures, Inc. worked with Perry on developing that code and has nothing
but praise for Perry.
"He had the energy and the vision to get the code in place. What he did
politically and from a grassroots position remains pretty much unparalleled,"
said Bock. "He showed a lot of leadership in trying to standardize strawbale."
The code was finally in place in October 1997. Periodically, Perry and Bock
teach classes in strawbale construction and say about 40 percent of the attendees
are single moms looking for an alternative, cost effective way to get a home.
The two men went separate ways, however, in terms of structural material for
strawbale houses. Bock prefers using concrete block; Perry, steel.
During the code writing phase, Perry's wife died unexpectedly but he continued
working with strawbale. It's now been eight years since her death and he says
"I know she's watching to make sure I continue working on this,"
he said. Perry has since remarried, and he and Kay live in a strawbale and
steel house in the hills behind Lamy.
While writing the code, engineers took strawbale houses through three sets
of tests: fire, wind and insulation. Straw, being the hollow stalks left behind
after the threshing of grain, doesn't readily burn. In compacted bales it
smolders. Perry said he obtained a two hour fire rating and that no house
has more then a one hour rating.
"In order to pass the test the interior temperature is raised to 1,000
degrees F in five minutes, increasing to 1,550 at thirty minutes and 1,750
in one hour," he said. "The highest average temperature on the exterior
face of the wall was 63 degrees F when the internal temperature was 1,942
degrees. There was no penetration of flame."
Also, the strawbales withstood 75 mile an hour winds; and all insulation tests
came up with an R-value of 50 in the walls. Energy savings average around
80 percent.
Though others use straw and steel, Perry has the patent on a specially designed
steel post. It's four-sided and at the house corners each post is set at an
angle. "This way," he explained, "you only have to make two
cuts in a bale to wrap it around the post. If they were not angled you would
have to cut out a rectangle. No other construction method buries the post
in the middle of the bale." The red iron steel beams, posts and the lighter
weight galvanized studs are fabricated in Tennessee and Texas and shipped
to the building site.
What about bugs? It's a common question when using straw. But straw contains
no food value so bugs can't live in it. Yet, if the bales become moist in
the field and begin to rot, tiny beetles will live on the mold. Just to be
sure, some strawbale builders often take an additional, preventative step
by sprinkling Borax into the bales as they are laid. But Perry says for the
most part, straw is bug free.
His current project is a 3,000 square foot house in Bernalillo. Perry is not
a contractor and calls himself a systems integrator. He sells the system.
"People can give me a rough plan of the house they want. We'll run it
through our computer that does all the engineering and designing. When it's
finished, people will have engineer stamped plans," he said. "It's
a mistake to hire an architect because everything changes with straw and steel
and it all has to be redone."
When complete, the plans are ready for a contractor to build the house. The
plans run about $20 a square foot. Actual building costs run from $40 to $65
a square foot, almost half the cost of a conventional house. Perry says 65
percent of the cost of a house is labor and many people, mostly women, it
turns out, prefer helping with the actual building.
Joseph and Cherie Austin own the house in Bernalillo. Before becoming a grant
writer, Cherie Austin used to do architectural drafting so she designed the
house. "We thought about building for about eight years and finally got
serious about three years ago," she said. "I did a lot of research
when we decided on strawbale and Tony's approach made the most sense. It was
really cost effective."
She said she was determined to have the house the way she wanted it and she
and Perry went through about four changes, all having to do with the dimensions.
Strawbales measure 18 inches deep by 46 inches wide and between 14 and 16
inches high. The Austins ordered 1200 bales.
"We're taking a weed-whacker and a chainsaw to cut out the windows and
nichos," she said. "That's kind of fun."
Joseph Austin, a construction worker all his life, is building the house with
help from various family members. "I poured the foundation last January
and the steel framing is all up and the walls in the living room," he
said. "I've helped build straw and wood frame houses and I like this
better. I'm not a real fan of cutting down trees."
Part of the package that Perry offers along with the plans is a 133-page booklet
for homeowners so they can manage the building process themselves. He divides
the building process into 17 phases. Cherie Austin says she is using that
booklet along with others resources.
The Austins and their two young children hope to be in the house by mid-summer.
"It's real exciting to have a new house and we're glad we did it this
way," said Cherie Austin.
