Building Materials One

Bonjour! C'est moi, Nathan.

I will most likely always greet in French, I love the language.

With that out of the way, today I'm going to talk a little about the house we are going to be building.

Our house will be about 800 feet squared, at least the floor area. It's not exactly a tiny home, but it isn't a large home either, it is considered a cottage home. There will be a main living area which includes the dining area, the kitchen, and the living/family room. We will also have a two section bathroom (one for bathing, the other for doing your business), 3 bedrooms (two for the kids, one master), and a small office for our computers.

We have a heating plan, but that will be in another blog post, for now I'm just going to explain the outer wall building material we will be using.

First off, it gets cold in Vermont. Oh yeah, did I mention we will be building in Vermont, where today the expected low is 7°... in Fahrenheit. Yeah it's super cold there. So my sister and her family moved to Saint Croix, where it usually is blazing and humid, and we are moving to Vermont, where boiling water can turn to ice in moments, cool! To be honest, I am super stoked to move there and excited to start our journey to being more Eco-friendly.

SOOO, because it gets cold in Vermont, we need walls that will keep that cold air out in the winter and the cool air in during the summer, because it gets "hot" (around 80-90°F I think). So we need something called thermal mass (Wiki Thermal Mass) to do this. Now there is also r-value which is the resistance to heat loss or gain (effectively keeping a cool house cool and a warm house warm) the higher the R-Value the better the material is at doing it's job and also the best materials also contribute to thermal mass.

An average wall usually has an r-value between 13 and 23, and a 2x4 wall usually is about R11-R15 (which is what most walls are made at/with).

Why all the talk of thermal mass and R-Values? Because that is what led us to a company called Shelter Works ltd. and their product Faswall (http://faswall.com/). Essentially they have these awesome insulated wood-chip cement forms that have an R-value of 21-25 before even being set with cement and rebar. There is a ton of information on their website but I'll just say this, no bugs, bugs hate the stuff, oh and it's super fire resistant (See here). Best part is they use recycled wood pallets to make up 85% of each block and the other 15% is Portland cement. Also for each ~24"x 12"x 8" block you only have ~28-31 lbs of weight, and are able to be done by the owner. Average build time for a >1000 sq. ft. house is about 2 weeks.

Why do-it-yourself? Because we want to cut down on cost as much as possible. Most likely we will still have a contractor, but we will help as much as possible to keep some money in pocket.

So the reasons for Faswall are as follows:

High thermal mass (x)
High R-Value (x)
Eco-Friendly (x)
Do-it-yourself (x)
Fast build time (x)
Cost effective (x)

Yes it is cost effective because we won't have to have a massive heating system installed into our house, not to mention our house will be fairly small compared to others that we have seen, so the build time may be even shorter to get the house done.

All in all these are some of the major reasons we chose Faswall. Pretty cool huh!

Au revoir!
Nate