WHY WE DO WHAT WE DO
When we began our homebuilding odyssey eleven years ago, I had never built a structure of any kind, nor had I ever worked for a construction contractor in any capacity. I had a semester of basic power tool safety class, an architectural print reading class, and an introduction to stairbuilding class, all of which I had taken in the evenings after work at a local technical college. From there I gathered a small library of books about building construction. The idea of building with strawbales was not even in our vocabulary. Then my best friend (and workshop instructor) Scott Strecker suggested I consider a strawbale home, and I laughed, thinking he was joking. He wasn’t, so I started looking into it. As the list of good reasons to build with strawbales grew, I almost immediately became hooked on the idea. The bales would be locally available. They would be an annually renewable resource. They were relatively inexpensive. They could produce a super-thermally efficient home. They seemed aesthetically and environmentally appropriate to the landscape of northeast Kansas. And best of all, it seemed that this nascent movement of building with strawbales offered the possibility that someone like me, with zero building experience, could end up with an owner built home that offered all those benefits.

Along the way, we have learned that of all these benefits, this last one is at least as important and true as all the rest of them. But more importantly, building with strawbales lends itself to the coming together of a community of similarly inexperienced people to fulfill one of life’s most basic and primeval drives—the building of shelter. Outside of the timberframe barn building tradition of the Amish, there is no other building technique, system, or material that brings people together to celebrate this most important of endeavors like strawbales. The fresh, bright smell of golden new straw; the wet, earthy richness of native clay plaster; the tap-tap of the hammer, or even the breathy bark of a pneumatic nailer; the rasping voo-pah of the handsaw, or even the banshee shriek of a power saw; the occasional roar of the chainsaw; and the cooperative banter of an efficiently determined crew of neophytes trained toward goal of seeing walls rise from the ground to enclose everyone under the protective hood of rafter and roofboard—all these have become the vernacular of the community of those of us who have had the absolute joy of building with bales in and around Jefferson County, Kansas. We look forward to sharing that joy with you.

We continue the homebuilding journey today as we work to finish the details of the home we have lived in and worked on for the last seven years. We have had the great good fortune of conversing with (and working alongside) some of the most creative and skilled ordinary people and trained craftspeople in our area. It is our hope that we can now begin to share the benefits of this dialogue with you. So we invite you to come learn the language with us. We’ll work from dawn to dusk for six days and immerse ourselves in the vernacular and activity and beauty of building community as we build with bales.