Build with Straw Bales

You will not beleave the quality and beauty of this hand built straw bale home.
Please click by http://activerain.com/blogsview/189253/-The-most-architecturally to see the blog post I wrote about my visit last week.

When you build with straw bales you need to get used to the wolf jokes and lots of sceptical looks. People think that this technique is a bit too "hippy" and that these houses are weak, insecure, pest ridden, and that they will not last. All of that is WRONG! In a well built modern straw bale house you will be amazed at the quiet personalised beauty. I will look at these (non)issues more in this lens.

In the short NO!
The "Nebraska" style straw bale house, that is a straight forward load baring perimeter wall with a simple gable roof, is called "Nebraska" for a reason. Wood was very scarce on the great planes a hundred years ago. So people figured out how to build homes with what was around. Yep, Straw bales. and some of those houses still stand over a hundred years, and going strong.
You see Straw unlike Hay, has very little to offer in the way of food for pests. Straw is the cut stocks of grain with the seed already removed. Hence no mice or bugs.
To make a straw bale houses long lasting and weather proof they are plastered, sometimes with stucco or shot-create(the stuff pools are coated with), but now more frequently with natural earth plasters, a mix of local clay, sand and chopped up straw. this mix is close to adobe or cob. Often houses with natural earth plasters are top coated with a lime plaster finish coat. Lime applied correctly turns into almost limestone and has great weatherproofing qualities for straw bale construction.

Now people will say that there is a million ways to build with straw bales, but honestly there is only thirty-seven ways, and a few hundred thousand variations. Yes thats a joke. But there are no two straw bale buildings exactly alike, and that makes it difficult to define the HOW DO YOU DO IT? question. So I will tell you how I plan to do it, and point out a few other ideas along the way.

Right now I am waiting for the right piece of proplerty to come on the market. So I have not done this yet. but this is how I plan to build my straw bale house.

Now I'm not a great fan of concrete, but It has it's uses. Foundations and footings are a couple of things that concrete excels at. I plan on poring a pad with a good perimeter foundation and toe up as wide as my bales. Then constructing an engineered steel framed roof. Think of the sort of thing many high-schools have for the kids to sit under for lunch. Then "in-filling" walls with straw bales. and framing in windows and doors in recycled and surplus wood. After the walls are up and polly netting is sewn to the bales, I will use local clay, (we have some great clay deposits in the area, but the stuff is almost everywhere) mixed with sand and chopped straw to hand plaster the walls. After two coats of clay plaster I will do a top, finish coat of lime plaster to seal the clay and really make it beautiful.

Maurice & Joy Bennett, The wonderful people who help bring us CASBA offer this great class each year. I went last year and it was both informative and inspiring. The class starts off with an introduction, a general discussion of straw bale building, and some talk about the next days project. People tell about straw bale work that they have done and what they plan to do in the future. New ideas and changes in procedures and technology are explained and usually some great pictures are shown.

The next day we meet at the building site, go over safety, tools, and techniques we will use on that job. Then the fun starts! Last year we prepped the foundation and stacked bales for a wall of a shed and yard wall.

No Idea what we will be doing this year. But the class is offered throgh Columbia Collage and costs $50.00 for more info call 209-588-5144 or click gocolumbia.org

In this straw bale project in Riverbank, CA. straw bales are tightly packed into stud walls, the straw has almost no stuct