Flax

Crystal and I, along with our friends Pat and Joey (and a couple friends of theirs), went to Craik on Sunday to see the buildings there built out of hay bails. One building is right on the corner of the highway, and is made of (structural) flax bails. It has a standard roof, but the rest of it looks a lot like an adobe-styled building. The walls acheive R-40 (about twice that of standard houses built today), and runs off of their own wind-generated power. The concrete floor has in-floor heating. On a hot day like Sunday, without any fans or a/c, the temperature in the building was quite comfortable. Apparently flax is a bit of a miracle plant, but I won't go into that right now.














The other building is on the golf-course, and it is post-and-beam with wheat straw used as insulation. Same r-value, same stucco finish, just a little more refined. It has a large stone wall that acts like a heat-sink in winter, along with a wood-fired brick oven in the middle of the building. It carries many other energy-efficient technologies, to the point where it is a self-sufficient building. Best of all, the timbers were salvaged from a local grain-elevator that was torn down, and the bricks for the oven were salvaged from a demolished school.

I desperately want to get an acreage so I can build our house just like those buildings. They are not allowed to be built within city-limits just yet...if ever. Sometimes I loathe the industry I am involved in, with is mass-production, cheap, and inefficient practices. I guess it is up to Pat and myself to redeem it!

For more info, go to their website at http://www.flaxbales.com/info.htm
or Google "craik flax."