Building the NewenHouse Kit Home: Natural Gypsum Drywall and Ultra-Low Electromagnetic Field Construction

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Sonya Newenhouse, Ph.D. is an eco-entrepreneur who enjoys providing practical and creative solutions to help individuals and organizations live and manage green. Her firm, Madison Environmental Group, provides LEED green building and sustainability consulting services. She is also founder and president of Community Car, a car sharing organization in Madison Wisconsin. Currently she is developing NewenHouse, a business that will provide super-insulated sustainable kit homes.

The solar hot water panels are now installed and the windows arrived from Canada. Before the windows were installed, David reminded me to order the drywall panels and have them delivered directly to the second floor with a boom truck. This greatly reduces hassle and saves time because otherwise we would need to carry the drywall awkwardly up the stairs to the second floor.

Reducing drywall waste: I met with the drywall contractor, Doug Hurth, a week prior to create a detailed estimate of the drywall sizes we needed in order to reduce waste. Drywall comes in three standard sizes (4-by-8, 4-by-10, and 4-by-12). Doug carefully calculated the coverage we needed for the second floor and mapped out a plan for the best use of the standard size panels. While we planned our drywall order a volunteer, Danna Olsen, discovered an article that highlighted cautions about using drywall containing synthetic gypsum. Ironically, many drywall manufacturers display their pride in using synthetic drywall as it’s a recycled product and provides LEED points. It turns out that synthetic gypsum drywall may be linked to causing migraines and corroding electrical wiring. Rather than wait for the science to uncover the results, I’m using the precautionary principle and avoiding synthetic drywall. Our building supplier, Nuzums, found a drywall plant in Iowa that makes natural gypsum drywall for the same cost and it’s readily available. Because this brand also sells drywall with synthetic gypsum, we needed to specify the order to come from the Iowa manufacturing facility.

Drywall panels are delivered to the second floor with a boom truck. Photo By Sonya Newenhouse.

We only ordered the drywall for the second floor because we still need to grind the concrete slab (to create a terrazzo look and feel). If we brought in the drywall to the first floor it would be in the way of the floor grinder. It’s also easy to deliver drywall to a first floor.

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