This is a ongoing story about one family's adventure in relocating to rural Virginia and building a strawbale home. These pages were created because friends and family across the U.S.A. and the world wanted us to keep them up to date with our progress. The adventure is still in its infancy and it is expected that these pages will be updated several times during the next two years. If you want to be notified when updates come out please send an e-mail to Floyd.Update@Eklectika.net and we will happily add you to our mailing list.
There are many small pictures showing our progress. Most of the most recent ones also have a large version available which can be reached by clicking on the smaller one. Space considerations at the ISP prevent us from keep all of the larger ones online but all are still available if you send us an e-mail. The larger pictures typically are 50-100Kb so you may not want to dowload them all if you have a slow line.
Back in 1993 we had decided that we wanted to live in a more sustainable and independent way. After several years of being near-vegetarians we switched to a totally vegetarian diet and tried to grow a lot of our own food. We also got tired of being the victims of the occasional power failure and vowed to one day live off the grid, providing all of our own power by some means (presumably solar or wind). We also wanted to find somewhere where the climate and the culture would fit in with our ideas of a good life: a good growing session to help feed a vegetarian family, people with an interest in alternative health and environmental issues, and a place where we might find a variety of arts and crafts and, perhaps most importantly, a bulding code with would not give us a lot of trouble trying to build a strawbale house.
At the time we really did not know where we wanted to live or what kind of house we wanted to live in. All we knew was that we wanted to be able to build a house by using as much of our own labor as possible, using as much sustainable material as possible. We had thought about moving back to Virginia, where one of us was born, but also considered one or two other places. We also thought about various types of houses.
Then, sometime in 1993, we saw a TV program about someone who lived in a strawbale house somewhere in New Mexico. Like most people, we laughed when we first heard about it and made the obligatory jokes about three little pigs. The more we thought about it and heard about it, however, the more it seems to make sense, but we didn't pursue the matter at all until about two years later. At that time we started going to strawbale workshops, subscribing to "The Last Straw", a journal for strawbale building, and to the strawbale mailing list, and, over the next two or three years convinced ourselves that this was where I future lay.
Finally, in about 1999 we decided that we wanted to move back to the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, to Floyd county. This is about 30 miles southwest of Roanoke, where one of us was born and raised, and the next county over from Franklin county, where several previous generations spent their entire lives. We chose Floyd because of its reputation as a more eclectic community than some of the surrounding areas and also one in which we were likely to be able to pursue our dream of building a strawbale house with the minimum of building and zoning code restrictions.
The links on the left document the various stages of our adventure and contain many small photos (with links to large photo for the more recent ones). There are also pictures we have taken of some of the local scenery and a number of links to other web pages about the area and about building with straw. Your comments on these pages are welcome at the e-mail address above. You won't find anything fancy -- just simple text and photos without any dynamic or sophisticated graphics -- as I spend most of my spare time these days designing and building a house. You will also find that the pictures are on separate pages from the bulk of the text so that you don't have to wait for all the pictures to download if you don't want to see them.
We hope you enjoy reading about our little adventure.