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sustainable housing and why it matters

august 25, 2020

Sustainability, when applied to housing, is an environmentally-friendly approach to building that aims to avoid the depletion of natural resources in an effort to maintain a greater ecological balance.

Why does this matter?

There are some seriously dire forecasts regarding the impacts of atmospheric carbon dioxide on our planet. Getting behind the core concepts around sustainability, meeting our needs without taking from future generations, plays a critical role in offsetting or reversing the damage that has already been done.

Some examples of sustainable homes include tiny homes, custom prefab homes, straw-bale homes, zero-carbon homes, Earthships and earth-sheltered homes, shipping container homes, and cordwood homes. In addition to using fewer resources, they often can be built for a fraction of the cost of a traditional home and can become an effective strategy in living mortgage-free.

In July of 2020, we traveled to Upstate New York to learn from longtime cordwood masons and instructors, Rob and Jaki Roy, at their home and school, Earthwood Building School, during a cordwood building workshop with six other participants. Cordwood masonry is a construction method using short logs and a mortar mix to create the walls for whatever structure you’d like to build. Cordwood building implements sustainable practices by making use of wood, sawdust, and recycled materials that might otherwise go to waste. If built properly, the thick walls also use less energy by taking advantage of thermal mass.

Builders sometimes choose cordwood masonry for its aesthetics—it resembles stonework upon completion—but it’s also a low-cost, easy to learn, energy-efficient, and environmentally-friendly way to build a home.

We first discovered cordwood building after staying at The Mermaid Cottage, a gorgeous bungalow in Del Norte, Colorado, after exploring Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park. The couple rents the cottage on Airbnb for $189/night, yet it only cost them $5,000 to build.

The affordability caught our attention right away. Because when we talk about sustainability, we’re also thinking about financial sustainability. If you’re like us, and you live in an area with a high cost of living, keeping up with an ever-rising rent payment feels very unsustainable.

Why not buy a house, you ask? Everyone’s different in their approaches and opinions on this, but the idea of shoveling our savings into a downpayment just to have a huge mortgage that could take decades to pay off isn’t for us. We want to buy something in cash… or in this case, build something with the cash we have on hand. Explore Cordwood Building for Mortgage Freedom to see if cordwood construction might be right for you.

photographs and text by elaine skylar Neal / Travels and Curiosities

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