Seeing an opening and taking it
Miraculously, designing the house for Another Place
Welcome to Another Place Times. You can read a little about me in my first post here, and then move on to part one of why this place matters to me, and part two of how I came to own 10.6 acres of land I call Another Place in Benzie County, Michigan.
As always, share around if you feel it. Thank you for being here.
Sometimes I feel like a football running back scanning the defensive line for that brief moment of opening, giving me space to run. I imagine if I can make it through the mass, it’s right down the line from there. Right now it feels a bit like that. It’s been over three months since I’ve published writing. Life took hold and I stopped writing with the intention of sharing it here. I instead focused on other types of writing; I wrote my girlfriend’s father’s obituary, the most challenging writing experience I’ve had yet. With the loss of Dave came long journal entries about death and grief and a reminder of the feeling of losing my own dad, a topic I’ll explore publicly more at some point. I wrote long wandering to-do lists and about the neighbor’s dogs and if they were or were not barking. I wrote a letter, I wrote some emails, I wrote a magazine submission, I wrote a thank-you card. And since October, amidst all this grief and shifting, life has presented me with a possibility of making visions into reality and the perspective of loss tells me not to wait.
Over the past few months, an exacting vision for Another Place and its future house has turned into actually designing and planning for that house. After sharing in my last post about my interest in a company in Maine making S-SIPs (strawbale structurally insulated panels1), a friend reached out to connect me with someone doing a similar thing in the Traverse City area. Ellis recently started his design & build company, Bale Craft, along with partners including Joe Trumpey, legendary professor at STAMPS art school at the University of Michigan who is known for building his own solar-run off-grid strawbale house and homestead in Michigan. Over the past three months, Ellis and I have met and connected over our shared values for building small, affordable, accessible, intentional and replicable structures. We’re now in the process of designing and planning for Another Place’s house (Another House? just one house for now).
While I knew about straw-based construction for years through friends,2 I only began to consider this method (of what’s often referred to under the blanket term “natural building”) for my own home build when I realized the cost of labor for more traditional builds could potentially make building a home financially unfeasible for me. I’ve researched nearly every option, including for a while believing that we were going to build a 200 square-foot log cabin. Most other homes that I could actually envision living in — from tiny homes (too small, zoning won’t allow) to prefab cabins (too much “modern farmhouse”) to a conventional builds using existing plans (something like Den) — were all prohibitively expensive mostly because they wouldn’t allow me to participate in the building process. The more I learned about strawbale construction, hempcrete, and other natural building methods, the more I realized that alongside skilled craftspeople (which is not me, currently), the average person could learn and meaningfully contribute to the building of their own home, which would mean that myself and whole groups of friends could put in labor and significantly reduce costs3. Beyond the potential cost-effectiveness, straw (along with hemp) naturally captures carbon; a strawbale building has the potential to capture 60x more carbon than it requires to produce it, which is not a statistic any other building method — “green building” and net-zero construction included — can claim. I’m new to learning about all of this; there’s a lot of science on strawbale and hemp construction out there if you choose to go researching4.
Natural building methods aren’t inherently cheap, and while straw is a byproduct of grain production and essentially free, it’s labor-intensive5. The actual cost savings for most everything happens when you do the work yourself. An integral component to this plan working is that alongside Ellis and our builder, a talented and sage natural builder and general contractor named Thomas, my girlfriend, myself, and friends will need to put in hundreds of hours of work. I quite simply have no idea what I’m doing; I haven’t yet participated in a strawbale build, but one truth is relentless: the only way to find out is to try.
Ellis and his team have been developing a straw panel method called a straw-SIP (or s-SIP) — a newer (to the U.S.) method of compacting straw and other materials into a standard panel off-site and assembling on-site — which is, coincidentally, exactly what I’d been researching in the Fall and what I’d recently settled on as the best option for Another Place. This method is essentially a prefab building with pre-built straw and earthen plaster panels that fit together like a puzzle, except you still do all the foundation & roof assembly, windows & doors, and plastering on-site.
We’re early in the design process, but the house is taking shape. The goal is to design a small (~800 square feet or less) home that is simple, affordable, beautiful, and ideally replicable. While this house is technically custom, many elements of the design are learned from other homes and spaces I’ve loved and spent time in, as well as sketches made by Ellis, myself, and others through the years. While the idea of a completely custom design made to fit and complement my life sounds romantic, it doesn’t lead to helping more people access quality, affordable housing. I want to design and build a simple, beautiful, affordable house and show others that with systemic support (inclusive zoning laws, building codes etc, we’ll get to that…) that they also have a chance to do this.
This project will essentially be an experiment. Finding affordable housing in Benzie County, like nearly every place in America now, is difficult. For many, living with family, moving into a multi-family unit, or buying a manufactured home is the best option here, where housing prices saw an increase of 24% in 2021 and 10% in 2022 respectively6. Finding an affordable rental in the summer months is nearly impossible as homeowners cash in on their properties with summer tourists. There are groups in Traverse City focused on affordable housing, and there’s hope with the Region D housing plan and organizations like Housing North, but creating options for affordable housing in rural communities is still tough. The budget for this house, completely, is $150,000-$200,000, which is far cheaper than any home on ten acres in the area, and would result in an affordable mortgage payment. My hope is that this house can inform more projects in the area, expanding access to home-building for people with normal people budgets who are interested in participating in the build of their own natural, carbon-capturing home.
Right now, there’s momentum. In November, I articulated wanting a house after returning from Japan where we witnessed our hosts committing to rural life and community-building so deeply. I realized that to begin, we need a central point and that central point is often a house. With this post-trip enlivenment came great loss, and with that, always and ironically, the perspective to live now rather than later. I’m in shock that these ideas are actually turning into plans; I’d nearly accepted that it wouldn’t be possible for me to have a role in designing my own home, although that’s been one of my biggest articulated life goals for as long as I can remember. More than a wedding, more than a child, or an impressive career is my desire for a home of my own.
I’m confident that this will be a great challenge. I can predict that my relationship to the idea of this home will shift throughout the process, and I’m curious to learn what else is within this desire for a home of my own. Is it a desire for refuge, for safety? I still wake up afraid most nights from mysterious fears and sometimes I wonder if I’m doing all this so that I can get a good night’s sleep. We’re designing in a lofted, tucked-away sleeping area because I sleep best when I’m up high. I’m learning that to build a home is to build a safe place to sleep. It is a desire for safety. Other times, I genuflect to the possibility that I’m building a home so that my dad’s soul has somewhere to rest.
Lately, in the wake of the loss of another father figure, I’ve remembered a dream that I’ve had several times: my dad meets me at the fenceline, a big red barn towering behind him, the sun shining somewhere beyond its form. He smiles at me, and I feel shocked to see him but grateful that he’s here. He’s still taller than me. I immediately want to take advantage of this time and I begin to ask him questions, “How did you get here?” and “how much time do we have?” He acknowledges the strangeness of it all and he apologizes for being gone so long. I step through the gate to his side and we stand there for a bit, talking; we don’t walk far. At some point, I look away, and when I look back, he’s gone. If people can visit us, they do in dreams, and if I can see an opening to collective dreams coming to life, if I can see that gap in the fenceline, I want to take it and run.
Shoutout to my great friend Andi who participated in Community Rebuilds in Moab, UT and first helped me link strawbale building to affordable housing
This is Community Rebuilds’ entire model ! Brilliant.
If you’re interested in what strawbale building or straw-SIP methods of building are, I recommend starting with The Last Straw magazine or StrawBale.com. The Last Straw just released a beautiful issue on the topic (featuring Bale Craft!), both physical form and digital.
Just putting this song here — My Sweet Midwest by Fruit Bats
This stat gleaned from the local Benzie County newspaper and this great article on zoning: http://betsiecurrent.com/index.php/zoning-and-you-benzie-county-housing/
so nice to see another place in my sub feed again! what an exciting development to read of, and to learn of bale craft existing where i live!