Fascinating Off-Grid Home Built with Natural & Salvaged Materials - Eco Village Living

foreign [Music] Eco village and we're on 25 acres in shawnigan Lake on Vancouver Island in British Columbia we're a park we're a farm we're a school we're a residential Village I'm one of the original Founders and this is my family's home so it's a great example of total hybridizing of design construction methods and people's way of seeing what is a house so we created this house over a series of years and so freya's house actually is created with a central timber frame but the wood itself comes from salvaged materials from windfalls that were rescued off of the clear cuts the north side of the building is actually straw bale it's a French straw bale method the southeast of this building is Cobb and so it's that Clan sand and straw construction but it's thermal mass and anywhere we can possibly get some passive solar gain we're putting the thermal Mass the west side of the building is wood chip clay we call it chip and slip often down the middle of the building and kind of as a feature to the building is a rammed Earth wall the floors are either Cobb or natural stone and they have radiant in-floor heat in them and it goes up into built things like this bench we're sitting on there is also all-natural plaster within the building sometimes we'll Salvage drywall if it doesn't have asbestos in it and create a wall system as long as it's truly salvaged and we're diverting it from the landfill one of our ethics here at our Eco Village is we said we would not use money to solve problems so we're not looking to buy the highest price item to make the most Beauty we're looking to salvage and divert things from the landfill that we can repurpose into a space and we're looking at as much as possible unprocessed low footprint materials clay and sand and stone and straw so we're bringing all those elements together into really intelligent design in what we call living building design so 1200 ish square feet in Cobb construction you're getting a lot of round walls it's pretty hard to calculate anything Square we have really big roof overhangs and we're looking at a good hat and good boots when we're building these kind of buildings we're in the west coast we get a lot of rain we want to protect these buildings for children's children's children so that's kind of the protective space around the building but it also makes it seem quite a bit bigger it's very patterned and Artful this specifically was to take as much repurposed material and turn it into art as possible as well at our Eco Village we have the kind of on-grid space which is much more kind of commercial scale size up in our housing cluster with the nine homes that are separated by our agricultural area we're trying to be off-grid producing as much as we can and treating as much as we can in situ so having composting toilets separating out our gray water so you have light gray and dark gray water depending some of the buildings split those some of them combine them so it's actually a resource that is used for irrigation and micronutrients we're looking at really low levels of water consumption and the systems on the buildings are inherently interconnected with everything about the built environment a building doesn't stand alone in Village design we're not creating a house we're creating a whole systems theory applied call it permaculture design call it Eco Village design call it systems theory design but you're looking for that holistic picture of everything being interconnected one of the really notable things about freya's house is the front door this is actually a spalted maple and we had a tree that came down we were going to chop it up for firewood but you can see it looks like a little child Drew on it with a felt pen this door is very thick and I designed a window to go into it that was custom made but this we just make it on site everybody contributes a lot of beauty everybody has their own aesthetic but this wood is literally right from the land this is a three-bedroom house out of the 1200 square feet the doors and all the wood and everything that is all just hand crafted in the space this is a bit of a darker room but come on in so this is a double tub and this bathroom is overly large so the top kind of fit here and in permaculture design we say the problem is the solution if you can have that much water it's not really a problem it's actually a solution of how you're watering all your food forest and your fruit trees and so we've landed the tub into a corner area here and then surrounded it with Cadillac so Cadillac is limestone on the wall and we've polished this for 24 hours into place a lot of this stonework and all of this Mosaic work we will pull off sample tile boards and strip for hours and hours and hours all these beautiful colors to get just that kind of Exquisite work we have Mosaic in every building every place becomes an art piece the beauty of that is we're also again putting waste to Resource this is a composting toilet very simply in 2016 a number of the folks who worked and taught here at our Eco Village came together and took on the Ministry of Health protocol calls for Waste streams including gray and black water Wastewater systems and composting toilets becoming legal I believe codified in 2016. and so that makes things like composting toilets seem very simple now legally into our houses that's not true across Canada and that's been a long journey and a lot of work so this is kind of exciting now that you can actually have low-tech technology in your home there's a clean out the back very simple system you have shavings that cover so you know you're not having odor these kind of things there's a whole mouldering system way of composting that is healthy and safe which is why we work within the regulations all the time it's not to constrain ourselves I think regulations were really made to for health and safety we just have to figure out the greenest way to create health and safety which is fairly simple with human manure and so that compost waste stream goes not to our veggie gardens or anything but it does go to Perennial food crops and soil building I like really dark and earthy spaces so some places are bright and open skylights always help with that again a little bit more of this incredible spalted Maple that is our fridge and so if you put a cob wall on a north side of a building you're also going to have the ability to put low ventilation and a high release on that the cold air will drop it'll come into the space and it'll ventilate itself it'll actually create a little bit of movement this is a straw clay wall that's about eight inches thick so it's super insulated and the door is super insulated it looks like an art piece but it's actually a fridge door as well and then you can have a really small fridge for a whole family if some people I know didn't have an ice cream addiction this probably wouldn't even have a freezer on it it's probably one of the largest sucking energy elements in this whole house back to more of this balted Maple build your own cupboards the thing about building with round and building with crafted walls you now have to fit your cabinets into that but off-grid propane cooking this is an off-grid system so we're not using electric you wouldn't do that with solar panels so you really have to Think Through Your Design and your consumption we build small tea kitchens into our homes this is a three-bedroom house so this seems very small to people but we also have a whole Eatery a zero mile eatery on site we have all our food storage a lot more of our cooking all down in the main area we also have laundry down there so all of the major energy needing things can be put into common spaces and then our homes can have very low Footprints as well again this is all um recycled materials you know if you got a a set of French doors actually that's two sets of French doors mountable paint and purple but it marks the way into this south east facing Greenhouse open these doors and what you're gonna get at this time of year is just an incredible amount of extra free heat into the room and it's been chilly lately so this is a way to just do a low-tech solution to not really needing to use a wood stove or heat up your thermal Mass which takes 24 hours or more um a fun part of this greenhouse if you build it part way up to your second story you can put solar chimneys or access for that hot air that's rising to actually go up into your second story as well wood chip clay on the West Wall back to rammed Earth it's a very different process of natural building because it uses a lot of machine form work it's fairly loud but it has a beautiful result admittedly this is pinned to the timber frame so I think we put three percent cement into the mix and we didn't put rebar typically the engineering on uh rammed Earth is quite High this is a fun feature where I designed crafted side walls that actually key into the main wall this kind of contains the heat here but if you can have a warm thermal mass in the center of your home it's a little bit like a battery in the middle and it's kind of storage um and then we go upstairs again more of that Maple that's cut for the stairway this will eventually have a mosaic that runs down the front face of the stairs all natural plaster you can really get some highlighting colors in the spaces um within the design you can use bright colors or or strong colors to make your timber frame or the wood pop this is just such a gift to have this level of kind of Timber Frame where you can infill it's kind of like the quintessential um point of bringing together the timber frame with Cobb or earthing construction at the same time and we actually pulled the frame inside the building um this is freya's room and you can make these really vibrant greens and colors that pop and bring the light to it the wood just brings so much more it's it's so much more than just a frame it's actually a lot part of the aesthetic and being with that natural material there's a deck out here I can watch the food forest and see what's going on all around what's growing and I'm in an Earthen building at the same time so suddenly the ecosystem of our life becomes very real in these kind of buildings and this is actually a foundation that was created on a 12 by 12 ring beam the excavated materials were turned around and put into tamped Earth bag Foundation you can see the wall sits a little bit proud on the foundation that stone work was done over four months of hand cutting every single stone with an Irish Stone crafter on the back of the building where you want your best insulation is French straw bale again the front of the building is Cobb Clan sand and straw so this was often done with workshops and all of the wood on this building is hand milled on site the windows are all hand built and out back we have a food Forest so all of our Wastewater is actually able to go off and irrigate within that food Forest one of them arguably most challenging things about our Eco Village is we did put all of our energy into the commons so we left our homes till the end and we concentrated on common space buildings and systems you know if you ask me what what would you do over about our Eco Village I know it needed to be the way that it is but I wonder if we would have focused on our homes first made sense right off the bat to be a non-profit Society so my house isn't going to escalate into the same dollar value as out on the street the land can't be a commodity that's bought and sold in real estate terms but it was really meant to be I'm not here for personal gain I'm here to bring more all the time and in regenerative design we're usually trying to put back five times more than we receive usually when you're a homeowner Builder you put your last name on your permit application and instead we put our daughter's name on the building permit and mostly because the idea of building for our children's children's children in Seven Generations not really just building for ourselves we're building for our kids and hopefully there will be many generations that live here over the years foreign subscribe to exploring Alternatives and please share this video if you liked it you can also find out more about our Eco Village on their website and on Facebook thanks for watching

Channel: Exploring Alternatives

Views: 123,625

Keywords: green building, natural building, green, natural, building, build, home, house, cob, rammed earth, strawbale, straw, bale, timber, frame, earth, earthen, floor, off, grid, off grid, solar, power, composting, toilet, wood, stove, heat, attached, greenhouse, reclaimed, materials, local, reused, ecovillage, eco, village, OUR Ecovillage, Brandy Gallagher, Exploring Alternatives, salvaged, technique, sand, clay, simple, artistic, greywater, filtration, living, lifestyle, tour, interior, exterior, sustainable, permaculture, design, 2023, new

Id: 2XmyHvcw3TA

Length: 15min 34sec (934 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 15 2023