Jay Shafer of Tumbleweed Tiny House Company is a designer specializing in sustainable architecture and urban planning. He is known as the guru of tiny houses and has a real following growing around the country. Jay was recently featured on the Oprah Show. I live about 20 miles from where Jay is located and hope to tour his tiny house pictured above in the near future.

Jay has many designs to choose from and all geared toward the tiny house market. These homes are stick built or the conventional style building that most of us are used to. Mark Terrano’s recently completed the tiny home pictured below based off of one of Jay Shafer’s plans.

Below is a short movie of the construction of a WeeBee house from one of Jay Safer’s plans.

For more information on how you can get his plans and build one yourself or have him build one for you, go to his site at: Tumbleweed Tiny House Company

WeeBee Construction

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If one were to take a large enough airplane engine with a propeller, and bolt it on to a barn door, it could be made to fly. This is the basic concept behind the average home design today. Through brute force, we use air conditioners and forced-air heaters to make our homes comfortable. It is done this way because the machines exist to heat and cool any building, of any design, in any climate. All it takes is a lot of gas and electricity to change the air temperature to our comfort level.

The problem is that all of this brute-force comfort comes at a high cost to both the homeowner and the environment. The homeowner must pay hundreds or thousands of dollars per year to make up for an energy-inefficient building design. The environment is stressed because of the pollution created from generating excess electricity, burning fossil fuels, and from the inefficient use of building materials.Energy performance is invisible to the average homeowner during the design stage. This is something that can be changed. We need simple, green building guidelines to follow so that building an energy and resource-efficient home does not turn into a complicated research project for the homeowner, architect, or builder.

Many green building elements cost nothing to implement, yet can have a dramatic effect at reducing heating and cooling bills. For example, by orienting your house in an east/west direction (with the long side facing south) along with a carefully designed roof overhang, it becomes much easier to heat your home with the warmth of the sun in the winter and keep it much cooler in the summer. By placing the majority of windows on the south side, the low winter sun will enter under the eaves of the roof, and add much needed heat to the home, and thus lower energy bills.In the summer, when the sun is high in the horizon, the direct sun will be prevented from entering the home, and thus keeping the interior cooler. By keeping west facing windows to a minimum, air conditioning loads can be greatly reduced. By making north windows smaller, less heat will be lost in the winter. These green building design parameters may add nothing to the construction cost.

Other guidelines may add some cost up front, while actually returning a net gain over the long run. For example, a compact fluorescent bulb may cost $14.00 per bulb, while an incandescent bulb costs 50 cents. If the bulbs were to burn 6 hours per day for 4.5 years, the incandescent bulb would be replaced 10 times and cost $21.90 in yearly electricity costs (based on 10 cents per kilowatt hour). The compact fluorescent bulb will last the entire 4.5 years and have an annual electrical cost of $5.91 for the same amount of lightoutput. The total cost for using the incandescent bulbs would be $103.55 while the compact fluorescent would cost $62.95. Even though the compact fluorescent bulb cost $14.00 up front, it actually saves the homeowner $40.60 over the life of the bulb

1. Now, where would you like to put your money? And why is it that the majority of home-owners still use the antiquated incandescant lightbulb?

With good green building design, and the proper use of materials, it is even possible to build a home in the high desert that does not need an air conditioning system. These homes actually exist today and I live in one of them. I know from first hand experience that conserving energy and resources through green design can actually improve your quality of living without sacrificing comfort. It is a win/win scenario.

Ted OwensSyncronos Design

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Recently I have had the opportunity to review Ted Owens Guidebook and DVD - “Building With Awareness.“

Green designer and filmmaker Ted Owens has spent much of his professional career in the field of energy and resource-efficient design.Award-winning filmmaker and designer Ted Owens guides you through the entire construction process of building his elegent and energy-efficient straw bale home. Building for efficiency requires more than just using straw bale for insulation in the walls. It is the entire house design the will prevent overheating in the hot summer months and high energy bills in the winter. “Building With Awareness” shows you how to look at the big picture and choose the proper materials and design parameters to insure your home is both comfortable and beautiful.

Beautiful design is a green building principal that is just as important as energy-efficiency. This video and book looks at a home as an entire system - the layout of rooms and windows, the materials chosen for specific areas, and how the home relates to the angle of the sun. All have a dramatic impact on how well the home performs. This video is packed with green-design and construction techniques from professionals working in the cutting edge of home building and design. Many of these concepts add nothing to the construction cost of the home, yet can save the homeowner thousands of dollars in utility bills.

Housebuilding seems complex until you break it down into simple components. By breaking the design and construction into separate elements—each one flowing into the next—the process becomes easy to understand.

Straw bale walls are like working with the oversized blocks that you used as a kid. Once you see the step-by-step demonstration by straw bale expert Stefan Bell, you will know that building your own home is within your grasp. Stefan is not only a master at his craft of straw and mud, he is also engaging and entertaining. Ted’s enthusiasm for straw bale construction is contagious. Learn each step of code-approved techniques for straw bale construction—stacking, noching around posts, window installation, code-required proceedures, how to split straw bales, plaster and stucco preparation—the whole works.

In the adobe section, Ted shows you how to build walls out of mud bricks. Placing thermal mass walls (thick, heavy walls that can absorb and store heat) within your highly insulated exterior walls, is very important—and sometimes overlooked in green building. This will greatly improve the efficiency of any straw bale home. This home stays cool and comfortable inside, without the use of an air-conditioning system, even in the hundred-degree heat of New Mexico. It does this by taking advantage of the local climate and by using adobe thermal mass walls. If adobe is not available in your area, either stone or brick can be used.

This home generates 100% of its own electricity. Wiring and electrical work for straw bale and frame construction are demonstrated by solar energy expert Joe Yarkin. Joe, when he is not working on electrical wiring for straw bale homes, is installing large photovoltaic systems in anarctica for the National Science Foundation. He brings a passion and knowledge of alternative power systems to this video. Joe wires this straw bale and adobe home for both a conventional and photovoltaic electrical system.

Stefan Bell also hosts the sequence on using an all-volunteer crew to apply the first coat of mud to the home’s walls. He demonstrates mud mixtures, application techniques, the use of tools, and additional tips and tricks. Nothing will get you up to speed faster than by watching Stefan go through the entire earth plastering process. By the end, you will want to get your hands dirty yourself. It’s fun!

The finish coat of earth plaster is demonstrated by author and master-of-mud, Keely Meagan. She wrote the original book on earth plastering, “Earth Plasters for Straw Bale Homes”. Keely will show you how to obtain a beautiful white earth plaster finish in a variety of colors—even if you have never plastered a wall in your life. She will show you how to mix the earth plaster and what tools to use. When finished, you end up with a beautiful, paint-free surface on your walls.

In the Guidebook and DVD, you will learn how to install a rainwater cistern, how to construct a rubble trench foundation to conserve concrete, and how to place your windows to maximize solar gain. You will learn how to make small spaces appear larger, and how to make the best use of the space you have.

The purpose of the Guidebook and DVD is to educate, inspire, and give you the confidence to build your own home using a variety of green building materials. This video is an engaging journey through green-home design.The Guidebook and DVD will appeal to both the casually-interested and the professional builder. Whether you are ready to start building or are just interested in the concepts, this video will inspire you to create a living environment that is truly a pleasure to live in. It will be the least expensive tool you buy for saving money in the design and construction of your home.For those of you interested in building a tiny house using straw bales, I would hightly recommend this Guidebook and DVD. You owe it to yourself to at least look it over. Go to the Building with Awareness website now.

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