The boys are going straw crazy!

Here was a conversation this afternoon:

Andy, “I am making no hay-stee decisions until I am straw”
Ryan, “That wall is looking stuffingly good!”
Michael, “Strawpendous even!!”

I had to leave (well, it was school pick up time anyway…)

It is looking strawpendous though J:

Front wall J

Curved window reveal in our hobby room J

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 One of the advantages of the internal wall frame – easy fixing points for the electrics:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 And after all our stuffing, these walls need a haircut (more of the “put something in, then take some of it out/off method of building”). 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Just wish we called this a weed whacker rather than whipper snipper – sounds more fun...

Strawbale walls?  Nah, we decided we like blue tarp instead!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Kidding, just kidding!! 

We have strung this up so we can paint clear sealer on our spectacular jarrah window and door frames this weekend.  I keep running my hand over the jarrah – they are just incredibly beautiful and I can’t wait to see them in our home (will be a few weeks yet … must.be.patient …)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And isn’t this a beautiful sight too?  Yep, we ran out of water from our rainwater tank 2 days ago – so getting a truck load in was a big relief.   Happy to have a good bit of rain after next week when the roof is fully flashed and finished – please.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Of course we couldn’t build without water available, so we are very lucky to have a certain generous building supervisor who let us grab as much as we wanted from his tanks – Thanks Rich and Kate!

We are strawpenters!!

Bale raising has started – and the roof is all baled up – both sides! 

This was 6.42am yesterday:

 

 

 

 

 

 

Three hours later – now you see them in all their glory (that is our wonderful neighbour who volunteered to help out – Thank you Birgit!!):

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 …now you don’t (Andy doing the covering in Albany Wool Batts sarking and it is still only morning tea time!):

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Richard was here too – re-tying the loose bales so they fitted in some gaps – but somehow he escaped the camera.

The guys then spent time getting the roofing all on:

 

 

 

 

 

 

… so this morning we could do it all again! 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 All baled up!!! Yay!!! (By 9am – just amazing!)

One bale too many up there though - I bet it was satisfying throwing it down.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Now here is a trick question for you – What is the longest distance in my world? 

That would be this 12 horizontal metres and 2.5 vertical metres to get strawbales onto our roof!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My goodness it was a lot of hard work and in between me whinging about how heavy some bales were I did remember to say a prayer of thanks that we are healthy enough for this hard work and that we (will) have a wonderful home to live in.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 So that has been our Monday and Tuesday so far J.  It is good J.

PS.  And you might notice my joie de vivre has improved (thankfully!) – it is amazing what a little blood, sweat and tears can do for a girl J.  And if I ever thought I was pretty good as an amateur psychologist, I have nothing on Richard Rowell!  Rich reads this blog so he knew of my melancholy and as we chatted about the progress on the home he nailed my concern on the head (which I couldn’t do!) – I was worried about letting the guys down.  We are getting to the point where the bank account is dwindling rapidly and when we run out of money, if it happens when Ryan and Andy still have work to do, it will really feel like we have let them down – I know how much effort they have put into building our home and we appreciate it so, so much!!  (I know we will run out of money, we have to really, otherwise we will just spend forever.  I know that too will happen, but it will have to be after we can say – “This house is finished (for now)”.  So I am madly balancing our budget too – got to make sure we can pay for all the big things that are on the horizon.)

We found it impossible to get anyone to ‘do’ our house design for us.  We had approached that architect who didn’t follow through on our meeting and we had actually worked with a greensmart house designer for several weeks – who in the end admitted they didn’t like strawbale at all so we parted ways (interestingly they had previously designed a strawbale home...). 
The Your Home Technical Manual published by the Australian government is actually a very good guide for building green (read this too!) and guided a lot of our materials selection – but it was Christopher Alexander’s Pattern Language that really showed me how to incorporate our needs and wants into a passive solar home that will ‘feel’ right too – that and running my 100’s of versions past our permaculture designer and strawbale builder supervisor – they set me on the straight and narrow when I was getting way off course – thankfully!!

We actually had what I thought was a pretty straight forward list of requirements for our ideal house:

©      Rectangle shape and simple roof for bushfire safety and ease of building

©      Distinct front door

©      Kitchen with morning sunlight

©      Pantry on the south

©      ‘Water’ rooms grouped

©      Private parents’ area

©      Symmetry (it’s just the way my brain works!)

©      Reading nooks

©      Solar pergola

It really did seem simple enough to me – why couldn’t someone help us with it?  But it didn’t happen, and when we left to move down here and were still nowhere near having any plans to get drawn up, I just had to accept that it would happen in its own time.  We had already worked out (we might have been a bit slow on the uptake here I think ;-) that it we really needed to be down south, to be part of the community, meet people and find people to work with - so this was just part of it.

And being part of the community, meeting people and finding people to work with us, has been really easy now we are down here!  Go figure!!

Getting over owner-builder phobia when you really don’t want to build was a two-fold method for me. 

Firstly I have educated myself to remove some of the fear – the Owner-Builder course at Home Base Expo was perfect for this and invaluable for understanding so much more (we actually had already attended the ‘building with a builder’ one – fantastic and highly recommended too – even for owner-builders we reckon), plus of course plenty of reading online (Andrew Morrison’s Strawbale.com again – great DVD series!), books from the library and talking to people who have built before.

Second – we just didn’t have a choice, if I wanted strawbale in our location, it would have to be owner-built – so big girl knickers and get on with it!

And that was that. 

Plus I had plenty of other things that needed doing anyway – like working through that house designing process for 18 months when what I really wanted was for the house to be completely built before we left town – yeah right!

So how did we come to want to build a strawbale house?  It was always my ideal, I just liked the idea of using a natural waste product to super-insulate a house, but my hubby was in no way convinced.

Until we met with the local permaculture designer down here that is – who, surprise surprise, happens to live in a strawbale house and has done for over 20 years.  Their current strawbale house is definitely ‘modern’ and very well finished – from the outside it looks like any other (better than others actually).  It is 'normal' looking (nothing way out or hippy) – so you really don’t know you are looking at a strawbale house until you are inside and told – shown the truth windows in the wall and the roof – yes the roof is strawbale too!

I was onto a winner here finding Warwick and Gillian Rowell.  We visited and talked designing our house and garden – Warwick put me onto Christopher Alexander’s Pattern Language (the best book ever for understanding our built environment and why it makes us feel good or bad – borrow it from your library and read it!) – and while we were talking, my hubby kept looking around and saying “I can’t believe this is a strawbale house”.  He was expecting a three little pigs and big bad wolf makeup I think!

So he was sold on the idea – yay for me!  Every other eco-building idea is not too far off the beaten track so they were no problem – plus we came to the conclusion that the house was mine to design, the shed was his! 

Meeting Warwick and Gillian was a double win though, because their son, Richard Rowell, just happens to run “Your Building Company” – working specifically to help strawbale owner-builders get the house of their dreams.  Plus they all lived locally so had the perfect local knowledge.  It looked like it was all going to come together nicely – but I still wasn’t comfortable with building (I wanted to go with a builder who would do ‘the lot’ remember) – so the idea of being an owner-builder just wasn’t on my radar!

And it has taken me a good while to get over it!!