My name is Jim Reiland. I’m an Oregon licensed general contractor with areas of expertise that include rainwater catchment systems, straw bale buildings, and earth and lime plasters.
There’s a story behind the name “Many Hands Builders.” Each of the family, friends, and neighbors who helped my wife and me plaster our home left their hand print in an earth plaster tile. The tiles surround our front door and remind us that we’re part of a community that came together to help us build. The name works on other levels, too—it takes a team of skilled craftspeople to create a comfortable, healthful, beautiful natural home, or to design and build a rainwater harvesting system—and I am fortunate to work with a group of very talented and committed local craftsmen and women.
Over a decade ago I became an advocate for building with straw, and by extension, using earth and lime plasters. Rainwater harvesting came later when I realized that the unfinished ferro cement cistern on our land could hold all the water we needed for a sizeable garden and orchard, with a reserve left over to help fight wild fire. Natural building and rainwater catchment systems belong to a constellation of practices that include organic gardening, land stewardship, and energy and food independence. Ultimately, these lead to resilient, sustainable communities better adapted to challenges and change.
Why natural building? We spend upwards of 70% of our time inside of buildings. Even though Southern Oregon boasts a Mediterranean climate with relatively short, mild winters and mostly pleasant summers, many of us still manage to spend the bulk of our time indoors. Most conventional structures built today are resource wasteful, energy in-efficient, and often toxic to inhabitants. Industrially machined materials excel at being flat, dull, and lifeless, most have a high embodied energy cost in their manufacture and transportation, and they do little if anything to sequester carbon.
On the other hand, locally abundant, natural materials have extremely low embodied energy costs, and are either carbon neutral or carbon sequestering. For example, straw sequesters sixty times more carbon than is required to grow and transport it. The same cannot be said for fiberglass or polystyrene. Straw is the agricultural bi-product of grain crops like wheat, rice, oats, and is often considered a waste material. And it’s annually renewable—no one complains when a farmer “clear cuts” a wheat field every year. North America grows enough grain crops that if we used only fifty percent of the residual straw, we could still build ten million two-thousand square foot homes every year. In recent years the United States and Canada had well under one million housing starts. Timber has a similar carbon sequestration profile, though it has a much longer harvest cycle. Local clay soils excavated from basements or road cuts are well suited to earth plasters, and local stone can be gathered or quarried for patios, walkways, and walls. Both can be done in environmentally sensitive ways.
In addition to having excellent insulation values, a plastered straw bale wall provides a distributed thermal mass that moderates interior temperature swings, making the structure less costly to heat or cool compared to conventional buildings. And the aesthetic qualities so many of us fall in love with—deeply set windows where shadows play and light shifts across gently undulating plastered surfaces—are simply not possible with conventional construction materials. Clay and lime plasters have been used since ancient times to bring light and life to buildings, and they offer the same simple, natural qualities as the materials they cover.
Why rainwater catchment systems? Because it makes sense for many of us who live in the arid west where we receive most of our rainfall in the winter and spring, but could really use it in the summer and fall. We planted native grasses to cover our bare ground, reforested our land with native pines, cedars and oaks, and made sure our road and building site was properly graded to eliminate erosion and runoff. After employing these simple, low cost rainwater management practices, we still wanted to store water for a summer garden and wild fire fighting. We finished a partially completed ferro cement tank built by a previous tenant, and now capture most of the water we need for irrigation or fighting fire. It offers water security should the electricity go out, or we need a lot of water in a huge hurry.
If you have an interest in learning more about rainwater catchment systems, building with straw, or using earth and lime plasters, contact me. I can build for you, build with you, or consult with you, and I work with owners, owner-builders, contractors, architects and designers.
