By Robyn Griggs Lawrence
Residents of Fraser, Colorado watched as a truck of baled plastic—the stuff they send to the recycling center—arrived in town and turned north on County Road 50. “Some guy’s going to build a house out of that stuff,” the residents recounted. Heads shook; eyebrows raised. People turned out in force.
Rich Messer confirmed that he and his partner, Ann Douden, planned to construct a home from plastic and paperboard bales. “We became a spectacle at that point,” Rich remembers.
Rich had remodeled homes in the past and harbored guilt about their environmental impact. Despite having limited experience, Rich planned to build this home himself. He wanted it to be easy to build, light on the land, and contribute to the field of green building.
Architect Doug Eichelburger, in nearby Larkspur, had been testing load-bearing bales made from paperboard scraps for fire resistance, insulative qualities, and ability to withstand compression. Eichelburger had built a bale barn but discovered he couldn’t patent the building system and lost interest in pursuing it.
Rich went to Eichelburger’s barn and knew he’d found his building method. “It was March, and the tack room was noticeably warmer than the rest of the building,” he explains. “I asked Doug what he was using to heat it, and he said the discharged heat from the refrigerator.”
Local Support
The ideal site for a paperboard home is level and accessible. Rich’s land was neither, so he needed a flat lot with generous covenants. “We needed covenants that were nonrestrictive, to say the least,” he says.
Surprisingly, the land search proved more difficult than getting plans approved through the Grand County building department. Marv Fischer, head of the department, helped foster Fraser Valley’s recycling program, and was thrilled by Rich’s idea. Once Rich and Ann found a lot , the plans were approved.
Tri-R, a Denver recycling facility that had worked with Eichelburger on his barn, saved Rich seventy bales of poly-coated kraft carrier board. “Much of this type of coated paperboard ends up in landfills,” Rich explains.
The paperboard bales were free. For the foundation, Rich paid two cents per pound for twenty-eight bales made of postconsumer PVC trash: toys, laundry baskets, shampoo bottles. These he laid into a five-and-a-half-foot-wide foundation trench prepared with compacted Class C road-base stone used as a footing.
Touch and Go
For Rich and Ann, the building process required learning and improvising. Rich and helper Mike Young raised the bales in six weeks and stabilized them with a concrete bond beam that was the most difficult part of the entire building process.
“Nobody in Fraser had done a bond beam like this one before,” Rich says, so he was completely on his own. He built a wooden framework atop the bales, drove rebar into them, and then poured concrete into the framework. “We didn’t know if it was going to hold or not,” he says.
Rich hung the interior wall framing and drywall off the ceiling joist resulting in space to move if the walls settled. “That was a hassle, and I wouldn’t do it again because there was no settling,” he says.
Staying Warm
Rich insulated interior walls for sound control, but the thirty-six-inch bale walls (insulation value = R-30) didn’t need extra help. The bales weren’t consistently square, so he slid six-inch insulation between the ends to fill gaps. He blew sixteen inches of cellulose into the ceiling (insulation value = R-50) and three-and-a-half inches of foam inside the foundation bales so that no radiant heat emanating from cables laid under floors would be lost. The floor temperature remains a constant sixty-five degrees.
To fill gaps around windows, leftover bale scraps and paper roofing materials were used to fill cavities. “The big thing was to have no air leakage and create rounded corners for the window and door openings,” Rich explains.
Their home is tight and efficient; Rich and Ann’s pay roughly $60 monthly to heat 1,200 square feet. “Because of the tight construction and high insulation, we don’t have any icicles or roof ice dams—unlike most houses here,” Rich says.
Plans Go Awry
Stuccoing, the most expensive part of the process, took three weeks to hand-trowel the interior and exterior with two coats of concrete and a colored coat of elastomeric finish.
Rich and Ann astutely timed construction so tile floors would be laid while they were out of town. The first load of tile fell off the truck. The next two loads came from different dye lots and didn’t match. Rich and a friend did the tiling themselves; it was excruciating. “The tile had to be cut to fit the lumpy exterior walls and angled interior walls—there were few straight cuts,” he says.
Fortunately, many subcontractors were willing to fit this project into their schedule. “They did it because it was interesting, compared with normal jobs,” he believes.
After community members overcame their hesitation, they helped at most stages. Neighbors and friends became concrete workers, hammer swingers, and even tour guides.
A Win-Win Situation
After six months, Rich and Ann moved in.
“I don’t think we really understood the sense of comfort we’d get from that much thermal mass,” Rich says. “It’s both quiet and has a warmth I’ve never felt in other houses, a serenity we didn’t think was part of what we were building until we lived in it.”
Ann loves the easy living. “That stucco’s never going to need maintenance, and the tile is really easy to maintain,” she says.
Would they build a home this way again? Absolutely! Although many people have expressed interest in this method, the biggest hurdle is bankers, who don’t appreciate building houses with trash. “You can’t get traditional financing,” Rich laments.
As for Rich, he abandoned his own fears. “Rich always says he wouldn’t have been brave enough before he was fifty to build this house,” Ann says. “You have to be willing to challenge the system.”
“It requires a willingness to take a risk,” Rich adds. “Traditional builders told me I was really nuts, but when I was finished, they came back to admire the craft of the project.”
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