The First 3 Years - In Pictures

Before adding in what is new...I thought I'd begin by showing chronologically where we've been...

July 2006, we received receipt of our land. We literally stood in the middle of an open field. The only view of human activity in this region is a strawbale foundation that had been started and abandoned a year prior and a freshly built grid road.  

May 2007, we broke ground as the 1st official Eco-Village pioneers. We set to work setting up the basic essentials to sustain ourselves. What we didn't anticipate is how much effort it would be to do that in this harsh environment. We found ourselves at time swearing at each other...swearing at God...and swearing at the cursed wind that seemed to never come from the same direction twice. Oh that wind! There were days that your eyes burned from the blowing dirt, and your teeth were gritty all day long. There were even times we couldn't talk to each other because opening your mouth, the wind would take your breath away. Luckily, those days only last for about a week each year in June.

We quickly realized that we we needed a place to put our tools while we built so we began the task of building a pole shed...Pressure treated lumber and plywood. This was one of the Ah-ha moments that changed the course of our lives in how we live. Lesson #1, if we were really passionate about what we were doing...and we wouldn't put it in our house, would we choose to build any other building with it? And thus, our straw bale garage idea was born.

Late that summer, we had finally gotten to a point to begin pouring the foundation. I still joke about how we decided to pour a footing and a seperate floor. Originally we were planning on pouring the 6000 ft2 floor in one swift operation. After scaring the local redi-crete company with our plans, they scared us first with the size of crew required and secondly, with the price for that much concrete. It became evident that if we were building with cash, we were going to need another way of doing it.

Plan "B". Some people - correction, a lot of people laugh at this, but to date, we've mixed over 90 cubic metres of cement and have saved about $15,000 doing it this way. Lesson #2 - Fast way with a 30 year mortgage, or slow way with plenty of sunshine and good exercise. We live in such a buy now-pay forever society, the thought of doing something by hand or something taking any length of time is completely foreign.

This is what the footing looked like at the end of the 2nd season in fall of 2008. This was monumental when you realize that the building is 150'x 75' and the footing is 24" wide by 12" thick...all mixed and poured by hand.

We scoured the countryside between Saskatoon and Craik looking for someone to buy bales from with no luck. We couldn't even find anyone who we could convince wanted to bale for us in the upcoming year. We were almost desperate at the thought of not being able to find a local supply and were looking at the absurd notion of having to "haul" bales into a agriculture based community to build our house with when we were Blessed by a wonderful local gentlemen who popped in on us one day to see how the building was coming. What ensued was a battle....Taylor-Fayes VS Wind. Final score...Wind 1, us 0. After spending a small fortune on tarps we finally gave up and said "what will come will come" and 3 years later, we still have a good amount of usable straw. This was yet another straw bale building lesson. All the books say NEVER let your straw get wet. NEVER put the bales in the walls until you have the roof on. What we found is the same wind that was our nemisis became our friend. We've found putting the straw in the walls was a better option than leaving them in the stack. The wind blows through the straw so that even after several inches of rainfall, the bales dry out. In the stack, that can't happen so we began to see losses quickly with the unprotected bale stacks.

January 2008, We placed the walls on our garage. This was testing grounds for what the large scale house and studio was going to be like working with the bales. We found a lot of things that worked well and an equal number of things that made us question what the heck we were thinking!

By spring 2008, the garage was beginning to take shape and we continued to wrestle with working 40 hours a week in the city, driving an hour and a quarter out to Craik, then working Friday night till Sunday night 12-14 hours or more each day trying to get ahead on building. Every free moment we had focused on building. This was backdropped by many weeks of the year spent in the hospital with our eldest son. All of this put so much stress on us physically and emotionally that at times we felt like packing it all in. It was also because of our convictions that we continued to press ahead...no matter how hard it was. I always joke that what doesn't kill you, makes you stronger...it also builds Godly character, stamina, and a family bond that can't be broken by anything this world throws at you.

Spring 2008 was also the year we embarked on creating a 1 acre garden. This began the journey of our own sustainable agriculture project that due to health problems has set us back a bit, but we continue to work towards each year.

As we continued building on the house/studio we continued to be torn with finding time to finish the garage.

Mixed in with working on the garage and house and studio, and infrastructure and garden was the realization that trees take time to grow and so need to be planted sooner than later when creating an areage. Lesson #3 - Plant hardy trees and plants that are local to the region. Anything else is going to consume all of your time and will probably end up dying anyway.

By fall 2008 we had started finishing the walls in the garage with stucco. 750 lbs in each 8' section of wall to be exact. All applied and finished by hand. We looked at how much bigger our 7000 ft2 two story house/studio was and were quick to agree that we either need way more friends or bigger equipment!

Winter 2009 we found another building method for moving ahead. Until now, our construction season was limited by the seasons. Now we began building box beams in the city during the week, then hauling them out and erecting them during the weekends.

We had a work bee which resulted in an incredible outpouring of help. The only downside to this was that we were the blind leading the blind! We discovered that round buildings don't play by the same rules as square ones and to date, we are still finding solutions to fitting the bales into the walls. We also found that when you have a large group of people helping, you need to stop working yourself and manage only. Otherwise your help doesn't have the opportunity to do what they are there for...help!

Spring 2009 was met with another milestone in our family's life. I began going 1/2 time at work, meaning I work Monday to Wednesday in the city, giving 4 days to work on construction and life. I joke that at the age of 38 I'm semi-retired but the truth of the matter is, some weeks, going back to work Monday morning looks much more appealing and easier. In the picture above, I really felt convicted to use our garden plot that year to plant a quarter bushel of wheat that was given to us a few years prior by a friend. We were yet again convicted of what our family should be doing a few weeks later as we watched a neighbour a couple miles away spray his wheat for weeds, and inevitablly smelled the overspray in the air for the next few days. What I find amazing is hearing a story from an old friend of how one of his buddies was a elevator rep and in the 1960's a chemical company gave a town meeting on the virtues of herbacide use. The farmers weren't buying into it, so this buddy got talked into drinking a glass of water diluted with the spray to show the farmers how safe it was. It was such a hit, the chemical company hired the man to do this trick on the road to sell other communities in on it. Today, agricultural without herbacides is unheard of...just like the elevator rep who died a few years later of an realatively unheard of disease called cancer. 

Summer 2009 was a year marked with many milestones. Pictured above is our cedar chicken coop that began the journey of raising our own poultry for meat and eggs. This journey began in response to Audrey being allergic to penicillen. To make a long story short, we can't eat out in a resturaunt and eat poultry, fish, and a lot of times beef. We had purchased beef from a local farmer and that worked well, but eating in a resturaunt or buying meat, poultry, or fish in a store was and is almost a guarantee of a life-threating allergic reaction. Hmmm...kinda makes you wonder why all commercial meat and fish is laced with penicillin? If you are questioning it, rent  a movie called "Food Inc." and you'll understand why.

July 2009 also began construction season on 36' glue laminated beams for our house/studio. These beams are constructed from 2x8 spruce with scarf joints between each piece of wood. Here Audrey is working on building a scarf in the end of a 2x8.  

Each beam takes about 40 hours to complete which means we will be building roof beams for some time to come yet. I've had many people comment that we are crazy to do this...but one thing that we remind ourselves of is that "we" are building our house. "We" know every product that goes into it and "We" know how it is put together. How many horror stories do you know of from people who have a house built and then have issues with foundations or leaking roofs or worse. In addition, no offense, but someone tells me "they" built their own house...yet never actually picked up a hammer (rather they picked out the design of the house and the colour of the tiles and then had someone build it for them) drives me crazy! We can honestly say that the lumber used was sourced in Saskatchewan and that the structual glue used is completely inert and non-toxic. Do you know where the products in your house come from? Again, our convictions are different that most people...and that's OK. 

August 2009, we dicided to unpack the turbine we had purchased a year prior and start flying it. Lesson #4 - If life throws you lemons, make lemon aid! The wind that is such a curse so much of the times on the open, flat, prairie is now our biggest friend. We realized that each day we sat looking at it in the box was costing us $20 to $40 per day for fuel in our generator. Now the generator runs once or twice a day for less than an hour and some days, not at all.

By end of Summer 2009 The house/studio is starting to resemble the blueprints and we are excited to think the roof will be erected summer of 2010. There is still the 2nd floor to add onto the house, but the sudio will be worked on first.

I absolutely love this picture! There is something organic and just plain right about the site of me cutting our first crop of wheat with a scithe and the kids gathering the cuttings into bundles for sheafs. Anyone with farm experience might note the abundance of wild oats in the mix...We seperated the wheat from the oats by hand and have a healthy amount of each for replanting next spring. This way of farming is not realistic on a large scale but for us, it is rewarding and just feels right. My doctor has been telling me for years that I need to lose weight. People I work with have gym memberships that cost $500 a year. This past year I dropped 30 lbs and gained muscle mass. For the first time in my life I have defined and sculpted muscles in my shoulders, arms and legs...and I feel 10 years younger. Hmmm...Maybe I should start a "Weight loss and body toning" business?

Winter 2010 was met with our homemade masonary stove. The bricks were reclaimed from a 1970's built fireplace that ironically had "never been fired" since the day the house was built. We felt it only fitting to put them to their proper use. 

During a rain storm in summer of 2009, we built a loft in the garage for a bit more space and better sleeping arangements only to realize that our garage could never actually be used to drive a vehicle into as a result of that and so it would be much better utilized as a guest house. Winter 2010 so far has been spent revamping our garage to have full plumbing, kitchen, and proper bedrooms. Once complete in the spring, We'll be moving full time into it as we continue to construct the rest of our house/studio.