1. Seasonability. Strawbale is an extremely seasonal material and being able to store hundreds of bales in the fall and winter to be able to build in nicer weather is not feasable for many people, ourselves included. This means that if you are in a cold climate and want to build a bale home, you automatically are placed in a time crunch from when you revieve the bales (ususally mid september here) and when cold weather makes baling and stuccoing difficult (can be as early as mid to late October). Compounding the cold is the dwindling daylight hours of this time of year, making working after business hours extremely difficult. For a new building technique to be truly successful it has to have no seasonal limitations.
Monthly Archive for November, 2007
Having gone through bale building and seeing the problem areas involved with straw (admittedly some being self imposed) I have been thinking about developing a new green building technique that embodies all the positives of straw bales and none or few of it’s weaknesses. At the same time I wanted it to be simple enough cost effective enough to be built by any moderately handy family. My criteria for this new technique are:
So living in the country with dial up and spending all you free time working on a house leaves little time for editing, resizing and uploading photos to your blog. I haven’t been updating the site with photos nearly enough and most likely they will all come in big waves like this! We are not as close to be done on the exterior as I would like but we are looking to get a stove in ASAP and some insulated tarps and get the stucco done. Here’s a pictorial of what we have been up to:
Laine unloading the first load of straw. (September 22)
Dad and Laine unloading straw.