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Description of  Building With Awareness - The Construction of a Hybrid Home DVD (2005)

The Building With Awareness DVD is now available as a DVD/book combination in the book section of Amazon (same title, with 152-pages and over 400 full-color photographs and diagrams. Even if you've read all the books, it can still seem daunting to jump into the construction process of building your own straw bale home. What is it like and what can you do yourself? This inspiring video shows you the entire process, step-by-step, from start to finish. You will have a front-row seat on the work site, learning from the experts as they notch and stack the bales and mix the mud. Building With Awareness will give you a solid understanding of the structure as a whole and how everything works together--positioning windows, why certain materials were chosen, and how solar energy can be used to heat, cool, and power your home. By breaking the construction into separate steps--each one flowing into the next--the process becomes easy to understand. Topics include post-and-beam straw bale wall construction, interior adobe thermal mass walls for improved efficiency, rainwater cisterns, earth-plaster techniques, wiring for straw bale, photovoltaic systems, how to achieve energy efficiency and aesthetics from the same materials, and much more. This beautifully presented DVD will inspire you to create an environment that is a pleasure to live in. Finally, there is a video for the rest of us who need to see the process in order to fully understand it. This DVD includes a full-color, 8-page quick-reference booklet with a floor plan of the home, plus a 16-minute narrated slide show of construction details. A second audio track, that doubles the design and construction information to over 5 hours, covers the pros and cons of various materials, construction costs, and the experience of building your own home. Awards: 3 Telly Awards for Outstanding Multimedia DVD, Editing, and Graphics.