New Straw Bale Home Helps Educate People About Climate Issues

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Kathleen Draper, a climate change activist has constructed a 1,500-square-foot, three-bedroom straw bale home that she said will help reduce global warming and keep her comfortable in the harshest New York winter. “I call it my ‘dwelling on drawdown’ project,” she said, referring to the future point at which the atmosphere’s greenhouse gas levels stop … Read more

Improvised Root Cellars

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Root cellars are great to help preserve some produce through the winter. When most people think of a root cellar, they picture a large underground room, often with an entrance somewhere in the yard separate from the house. But building a root cellar requires space and resources that are not always available to homeowners. Here … Read more

Woman Builds Tiny Farmhouse

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Tori is a shellfish biologist with no prior building experience. After falling in love with tiny homes and doing in-depth research, she built a modern farmhouse-style tiny house. As she puts it, her tiny home build was “powered by significant amounts of tequila and inspired by Joanna Gaines” of Fixer Upper fame. But it was … Read more

The City of Cape Town is Building Carbon Neutral Center

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The City of Cape Town, South Africa is using recycled materials to construct a new multipurpose center at the Helderberg Nature Reserve. The center, due to be completed by June 2021, has a horse-shoe shape and faces the Helderberg mountain. The Helderberg Nature Reserve will provide benefits include education, recreation, tourism, job creation and skills … Read more

Mass Heaters Combined with Staircases

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www.firespeaking.com has a whole page devoted to mass heaters combined with staircases, which seems like a great idea to me. Both mass heaters and staircases take up quite a bit of floor space, so if you combine them into a unified structure they conserve space and add a lot of interest to the room. Below … Read more