Welcome to our website!This is a record of our journey building a straw bale home in Sky Valley, California about fifteen minutes northeast of Palm Springs. The first question we are always asked is “Are you serious?”  Yes we are and yes we did say straw bales. 

How it all started

Mark and I wanted to design the house ourselves, so I was searching the Internet for sample plans.  I did a search on Santa Fe style homes and stumbled across a website about a straw bale house.  It was a study on a Navajo reservation funded by the Department of Energy.  I called Mark over; we started reading and became intrigued.  What we found was unique, environmentally friendly and possibly less expensive.  After talking to various people we were repeatedly told that straw bale was not possible in our area.  So we settled for a normal house.  A few weeks later we were reading through the Penny Saver and saw an ad for free telephone poles and straw bales.  We called thinking we could use them for stairs and landscape walls and were told they were left over from a straw bale house they had just built.  We again went to the Internet and found two sites that really intrigued us.  We called Tony Perry from one of the sites and decided to change our vacation plans to head to Santa Fe to meet him and see one in process.  Once we saw it we were hooked.  While on vacation we designed the current floor plan (the first one had too many corners.)  When we came back home we were able to meet with Bob Bolles from the other site and so the journey began… Why did we choose straw bales?

I got Mark to look at it by showing him it could be significantly less expensive to build.  Then when he saw the insulation values were almost triple standard construction he was willing to sit down and look more.  Temperatures here in the desert have a 100-degree range from winter to summer, so an insulation R factor of 50+ as opposed to R19 is invaluable.

For me it started with simple curiosity.  Then I read in “The Strawbale House” that the pollution made by burning straw bales every year is greater than that of all the power plants in the state of California.  I am not a fanatical environmentalist, but I do tell the kids that even one person can make a difference, so this was me making a difference.Bottom line though, for both of us, it just came down to wanting something that was uniquely our own.