Hairy Way To Create Totally Organic Household Insulation

While we sit at the drawing board trying to develop more eco-friendly home insulation materials that yield equally as high R-values as conventional materials like spun fiberglass, a few advances have occurred.

Companies are now pitching:

• denim material insulation created from jean industry scraps
• shredded up newspaper (cellulose) insulation
• mushroom styrofoam panels
  

While I love all of the aforementioned options (especially the 'shroom foam), I wonder why we don't follow what Paula Sunshine has done while renovating her British 16th century cottage.

She has no need for modern eco-fangled materials ever since she began to rely on the tradition practiced centuries before her of incorporating lime render plaster with animal hair.

The only difference? She's just tweaked the formula ever-so-slightly by using human hair donated by local salons instead.

Tudor-era craftsmen traditionally used the clippings of long haired cattle to add strength, texture and insulating properties to their plaster, often even using yak and/or goat hair in a pinch, but never human hair...until now.

Sunshine has found her lime render plaster mix (a mixture of one part lime putty, three parts of crushed chalk and as much human hair as she can incorporate) to be surprisingly flexibile and resistant to cracking, even if the timber frames on her cottage move a little.

Admittedly, it has taken her many MANY years of diligent trips to local salons in order to accumulate enough donations for her household insulation project...and she's even augmented her hairy collection with shedded bits from her cat, miniature daschund and black labrador.

So, pretty cool or pretty gross? Hey -- it's organic matter...why should we turn our noses up at it?