Good news and bad [wolf] news
October 12th, 2007 - Posted in eco-building - by Sarah|
The good news is that the building consent for our eco-friendly garage / workshop was issued yesterday.
Yippee!
However, the big bad wolf triumphs once again – we have not been able to build it out of straw as we’d hoped. The documentation for the garage including ’skinny straw’ walls (plasterers netting stuffed with straw and then plastered) was submitted 14 weeks ago. Normally building consents take 4 to 6 weeks to process but there are no straw buildings in existence in the Grey District Council’s area so it was all new to them. After about 10 weeks we had a long chat to the council who basically said that they still had loads of questions and that it would cost us a lot of money to get them the answers. There was only a slim chance that these expensive answers would convince them that straw would work in the humid West Coast climate. Then they would still have wanted us to pay for an ‘expert’ to travel down from the North Island to help them carry out their inspections of the building as it went up.
The plan for our 6m x 9m garage / workshop
Ever practical, we went back to our original requirements and decided that recycled polyester insulation would be just fine instead. We have won on some fronts though. We will be using a homemade lime plaster inside and out and all the timber except for the pre-nailed trusses in the roof will be untreated Lawson Cyprus. It’s a huge relief to be able to start building as we could see the seasons slipping by. The house consent documents can also be finished off and submitted now. We aren’t going to try again for straw but will super-insulate with some more of the Greenstuff insulation we are using in the garage.
