Conversation (Green Drinks) about Alternate House Construction

Where: Fireside Room, Pat Porter Centre

When: Thursday, November 18, 7:00 PM

This is an opportunity for folks interested in non-conventional house construction to get together and talk about their dreams and plans with others who have similar dreams and plans. We expect to have the following people there willing to talk about their experience:  

• Mark Rempel and Wade Wiebe: strawbale construction
• Tim and Janet Kroeker: straw clay construction and a masonary stove
• ???: hempcrete as a building material
• George Klassen: conventional construction with additional insulation, air to air heat pump, and solar panels
• Gary Martens: tiny house with solar panels

We would like to offer you coffee and say all are welcome, but COVID restrictions prevent that. Vaccination and mask are required. Please bring your own coffee.

Let’s Talk about House Construction

Most of us will invest in a home at least once in our life time. Many will make such an investment more than once. A question we all ponder when we build or buy a house is what to consider in a good home investment. Some of us will do this explicitly, others will do it implicitly. But we will all do it.

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Reduce, Reuse

I’m old enough to remember when milk came in reusable bottles. The milkman came by every morning, bringing full bottles of milk, and picking up the empty bottles. I can remember when soda drinks came in glass bottles, and the price of the drink included a deposit on the bottle. That deposit was enough to ensure that few of these bottles got to the landfill or were left on the roadside. If the purchaser of the drink did not return the bottle for the deposit refund, there were lots of people who would collect bottles for refund. Single use coffee cups were unheard of, as were throw-away plastic toys.

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Are We Adjusting to Climate Change?

When the South Eastman Transition Initiative first came into being some eleven years ago we had a booth at Summer In The City. In order to stimulate conversation we asked fair goers what they projected the price of gasoline would be in ten years time. Recall that at that time fuel prices had been going up and were nudging $1.50. Predictably there were many opinions, from a prediction that prices would be drastically higher to a prediction that prices would go down significantly and everything in between. Gasoline prices did go down, mostly because fracked oil and gas became available in a way no one had anticipated.

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Pink Hotel, Boutique, and a Swingin’ Hot Spot

If you consider for a moment why you choose to live where you do, it’s likely because of the opportunities you expect to live in health and security, to make a good living, and to spend time with family and friends. At their base, however, all of these things actually depend on the ability of the land to physically provide you with these opportunities. You need a patch of property to live on, and if you want to build a house, that patch has to be empty. But have you noticed that there are fewer and fewer “empty” patches?

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