Our house, "Dunvegan", April 2008

This is the right side. You can see that I've started staining the light grey lime plaster the beautiful, mottled rust colour, by applying ferrous sulfate (Iron) mixed with water.

Here is the front of the house.
I forgot that this blog site posts new things on *top*, rather than under what's already been done...so you will have already seen the other parts of the house before you see this picture of the front...!
I designed the house in March, 2003, as I lay in bed sick, at our home in Oakland. I was furious that I was sick, because there was so much I needed to do to get the house ready before we could sell it. But I quickly realized that it was a perfect time to design the house, and that it would not get done if I wasn't forced to by being ill. A year later, we were living in 2 trailers on the property we had bought, and it was time to draw the plans. I'd never drawn "real" plans before- done plenty of sketches of gardens and a few rooms- but I'd seen both my mom and dad do it many times, and I had with me the plans my dad drew for the second storey we built onto the Hudson St. house in Oakland. I happened to have in the trailer with us a roll of tracing paper from some other project, a clear 1/8th inch marked ruler, and pencil stubs of Olivia's. I knew pretty much how a post and beam house was built, but even though I'd been reading a lot about them, I knew I'd need a lot of help with how to build a straw bale house. A guy Bill had worked with in Oakland told him, "You're going to build straw bale? You need to talk to Catfish Jack at emerald earth!" We had no idea what an "emerald earth" was, or how to get in touch with this Catfish. We had our trailer on the property of an old friend's place in Mendocino for a few months while our land was in escrow, and one day she showed me a newsletter she had from a place called Emerald earth. this must be it! It had a very fine article in it about peace and ending war and such- certainly something close to OUR hearts! And it was written by a guy from Emerald earth called Jim Stoops. I had known a Jim Stoops many years before, in Oakland, and he had moved north. His was an unuaual name- maybe this was him. We called the number and found that Catfish Jack no longer lived there, and that, yes, they did deal with straw bale houses, but they were all booked up for the year, and yes, JimStoops did live there, but he was away now, call back in a month.
I called back several times, the Jim Stoops person was elusive, and I still did not know if he was the guy I had known. But I prevailed, and finally he had come back, and he was indeed my old friend. We arranged to go to Emerald earth and see Jim. There a few minutes, told Jim what we were doing, a guy walks by and Jim says, "This is the guy you need to talk to!" It was Daryl, and he had just had something fall through, and he was available to help us with our project! So, with Daryl's technical knowledge of straw bale building, I was able to draw up the plans, working at night by lantern light on the table that made up the trunk of our car and the 3 pieces of "equipment" mentioned above! Somehow I managed to draw up plans that passed the building dept, including a full basement. (Charlie Hochberg gave me a drawing of the basement foundation cross section from his house, and I borrowed the basement plans from another neighbor, Kevin, and I was able to extrapolate them into our needs...)
We hope you will come up and see what we have done!