MOTHER EARTH NEWS

Slow and Steady

After nearly 30 years of living and working in Madison, Wisconsin, we longed for a rural home. We’d spent several frustrating years looking for rural property, but anything with livable buildings disappeared quickly. So we decided that in order to acquire our dream home, we were going to have to build it.

We started researching alternative building techniques and chose cordwood. Our planning process commenced with a discussion of what our dream home would include, and we laid out the floor plan with an inexpensive software program.

In 2002, we

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