Three-day weekends are beautiful things. I had big plans to read all those green building books I picked up from the library, build a springpole for my dogs, and get some gardening in. Instead I made a pitcher of mojitos, ate too much barbecue, and watched five straight hours of television. I feel like a new man. But the weekend wasn’t all mindlessness. I spent a good portion of it staring at my studio. Last Friday, I had an architect over who seems like he’s gonna be The Architect. He’s a straw bale fanatic, and pretty well-connected to the energy mafia here in Boulder – the green building product suppliers, the green consultants, the straw-bale masters and energy nerds.

More important, he was wasn’t dead set on doing things one particular way. Before this guy, I had a builder over who wanted to rebuild the studio – same footprint, same floorplan – using structural insulated panels. SIPs are essentially big sections of rigid foam insulation sandwiched between sheets of plywood. They’re structural, so you don’t need stick framing – you just pop a panel up, lock it into the foundation, and presto, you’ve got a wall – creating a super tight building envelope. I had thought previously about using SIPs for the studio, but as you might imagine, having all that foam near all those ants made me junk the idea. When I brought the ant issue up with the builder, he was pretty dismissive. He just wanted to get it done – on time, under budget and all that – and SIPs seemed the easiest way to go, ants be damned. That’s what pesticides are for, right?

The architect was more open-minded. I told him that I was looking for a few specifics: to make the place ant-proof, to build it as green as we’re able to reasonably afford, and that I wanted to construct as much of it myself as possible. (Well, by myself or with the beer-funded aid of a few buddies.) And that I wanted to spend as little as possible given those parameters. We hashed out some basic ideas – changing the roof line from gabled to clerestory, using straw bales or insulated concrete forms, integrating some solar thermal panels – but what really came up clear was that we could afford to get experimental. The studio’s a small space, and I’m going to want to work in there someday, but no one’s going to go homeless if we don’t finish it in three weeks, so why not take the time to find out what’s possible? Could it generate its own heating? Can we get it to zero-energy?

This week we’re looking into the basics, costs and permits and all that grit. But I should be getting some rough sketches sometime soon; I’ll put em up when I do.