A few of the elements that make up Joe and Shelly Trumpey’s Grass Lake home don’t sound like the normal elements of a building plan. Straw bales. Soy-based insulation. Recycled newspaper. Screen soil. Recycled steel. Sand. Strange as it might sound, these and other natural elements that make up the house and give Joe Trumpey the last laugh when he gets his utility bill.
Oh, right — he doesn’t get a utility bill. The Trumpeys live off the grid, using solar energy to fuel 60 golf-cart batteries. Electricity from the batteries heat, cool and power their home. They have lived there since fall 2010.
The two-story, 2,000 plus-square-foot home on 40 acres — still a work in progress — is what is called a “straw bale home.” The timber-frame home’s base and walls are built from bales of straw harvested on and around the Trumpey property. An adobe mixture, made by Joe Trumpey, covers the exterior of the house.
In fact, Trumpey designed the home, and he and his wife built it themselves, breaking ground in 2008. Cost was about $75 per square foot, compared to the $80 to $200 per square foot for construction of a traditional house. The only thing the Trumpeys didn’t do was the foundation.
He jokes that when people find out about the house, “most folks expect it to be not as elaborate as it is,” he said. “Most people think we’re living in a little mud hut and growing hemp in the back yard or something.” Reality is quite different. Visitors driving along the winding dirt road come upon a large, southwestern style home. And while a large garden will grace the back yard, hemp will not be one of the plants growing.
Trumpey, a professor at University of Michigan’s School of Art and Design, and School of Natural Resources, got his interest in nature, the environment and green living from his experiences as a Boy Scout. Shelly Trumpey, a third-grade teacher in Pinckney Public Schools, shares that interest and they are passing it on to their young daughters, Autumn and Evelyn. “We started farming 18 years ago,” he said. “And neither one of us grew up on a farm.” They had lived on a farm in North Carolina and decided to move back, livestock and all, to the Midwest to be near family. Joe Trumpey is a native of central Indiana.
They moved to a small Michigan farm, and then decided to explore what kind of environmentally friendly home they could build. That’s when they acquired the property in Grass Lake Township.
Joe Trumpey’s research on what to build took the better part of seven years. Building took about two and a half years. “It wasn’t our goal to make it big and complicated,” he said. “The house reflects our interests. “It did grow in size and complexity over the years,” he said. “It didn’t shrink.” With a straw bale home, the adobe exterior is cold or warm, depending on the time of year. Trumpey used nearly 20 tons of adobe he developed for the home, “and I have five to eight tons to go.”
In traditional homes, cold and hot air moves out across the siding, plywood, insulation and drywall. With a straw bale house, the straw bale “is this big, thick insulating piece that is all dead air,” Trumpey said. “There is no thickness conducting heat or cold through. By breaking that thermal barrier, it is a lot more energy efficient.”
Embedded in a wall on the first floor is the “truth window.” Once a small door is opened, the straw bale wall is revealed — the standard proof of a straw bale home.
Shelley Trumpey did the stonework for the house, including the thick stone base. She also personalized her work with artistic designs at the windowsills. She used about 50 tons of rock from their property, her husband said.
Heat comes from an energy-efficient fireplace and the wood-burning stove in the kitchen. The home’s floors have piping in them, which distributes radiant floor heat. A thermal chimney made of stone rises through the middle of the house to a cupola. Cooling the house in the summer means being aware of the weather and opening and closing windows in the house and in the cupola to let air through, he said. The ceilings are insulated with soy foam. The walls have an R-value of 40 to 50. Usual R-value for a home in this area is 19, according to Michigan State University Home Extension.
There is no central air- conditioning system. No direct sun comes through the windows in the summer, which also helps. “Honestly, you can stand in the front door in the summer and it feels like there is air conditioning,” he said.
The Trumpeys were intent on using and reusing material from the area to build the house. In addition to the straw and stones, they also used wood from ash trees in the area that were infested with Emerald ash borer disease for flooring and other woodwork in the home. Though the trees had been infested, the wood was still good to use for the house, Trumpey said. The wood handrail going to the second floor is a large tree branch Trumpey found on the property. The staircase railing came from sticks from the property. He made the kitchen counter top from a maple tree, and constructed the wood doors in the house.
The home boasts a “summer” and a “winter” kitchen. The summer kitchen is in a covered patio area off the back of the house. There is a wood-fired cook stove, sink and stone-based counter area. A stairway outside the house goes to a root cellar, where Shelly Trumpey stores the 800 quarts of food she cans each year. They grow and raise most of their own food. “My wife is a hard-core gardener,” Trumpey said. They also raise livestock to supply their own meat.
Inside the house, the winter kitchen has a wood-burning cook stove, as well as a microwave oven and refrigerator. For the most part, it looks like a traditional kitchen.
While the home is energy and environmentally efficient, it looks like any other home, and the Trumpeys are like any other family. The girls play video games like many other children, and there’s a flat screen television on the lower level.
An unusual feature in this modern home is the dumbwaiter, which goes from the root cellar to the second floor and is used for transporting anything from laundry to canned food.
The family keeps a close eye on electric use, making sure “vampire loads,” or appliances and devices that are shut off but still drawing electricity, are unplugged. While the average household uses 11 to 12 kilowatts of electricity per day, the Trumpeys use three to five kilowatts per day. The golf cart batteries, fully charged, can power the house for four to five days.
The girls were allowed to decorate their own bedrooms — a Katy Perry poster is proudly displayed in one, while the other daughter chose a warm pink color for walls.
Trumpey smiled when asked what his daughters thought of the home and its efficiencies.
“They don’t know anything else,” he said. The next project is finishing a barn for the livestock. “We will never be done,” Trumpey said. “There will always be something to do.”