With the help of family, friends and our wider community, my partner and I built a passive solar strawbale home. Building a home is an incredibly rewarding, exhausting and empowering thing to do. It’s an opportunity to implement ethical principles, learn and practise skills, build community, and create a space to live in that is truly reflective of your personal aesthetics and philosophy.
Our house building journey germinated many years ago when as a 15-year-old, I visited the home of a woman who had built by hand her own tiny mudbrick home. From that moment on I was somewhat obsessed with the idea of building my own home. It was very early on in our relationship when I declared my intentions to my partner, Genevieve. Luckily she came onboard, and in the last six years we have hand-built a strawbale tiny house (which we lived in for five years) on our property in the Bega Valley, while we prepared for and built our larger family home that we moved into in March this year.