Greenspree has been blogging about the construction of his new strawbale home at his very own My Sietch blog. He has posted an interesting but frustrating update.

We bought out development permit the end of last week and got all the info to our mortgage broker.

Last Friday I got a call from her where she suggested we go through CMHC, even though we have a 25% down payment and can go with a standard mortgage, because the rates would be comparable and dealing with CMHC would somehow be easier. It wasn’t. Early this week she called back with some questions from CMHC on the strawbale construction and asked if we had experience in building with strawbales. I replied no, but it being infill only it shouldn’t be an issue. She said ok, and said she would talk to the CMHC. The next day she sent us an a-mail stating we would need a structural engineer to review and stamp the drawings and be present at each of the draw inspections.

I was, and still am, quite confused at this request as our building structure is being built with conventional stick framing that exceeds the NBC requirements. It seemed an arbitrary requirement and suggested that the CMHC representative didn’t have enough info on what we were doing to make informed recommendations. The fact that they did anyways, and one that adds considerable costs and delays to the start of our project seems irresponsible and unprofessional to me and I said so in a reply to our broker

Go check out the rest.
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