Our straw house

John Dow

Former Member (at his request)
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We are of course further along than these pictures show, just starting out with a bit of background. The first three show some of the foundation work. Most of our site is on bedrock, but I did have to trench down to bedrock in several places and put in concrete stemwalls to get back up to grade.

Above grade the foundation consists of two parallel stone walls with concrete poured between them and leveled off. The foundation took a total of 6 months, just the two of us working on it.

The last two pictures are a bit of the floor work. Its a pretty conventional joist floor with sills on the stemwall and a central beam reducing the span. We insulated the floor as we sheathed it, which made the insulating easy, but gave us some headaches later on.
 
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I'll second what Jim said, I've seen some stuff on it, and I know a guy that did one a long while back, but I'm also real interested in seeing what you are doing or have done.

Cheers! :D
 
Nice foundation John. The clean bedrock shows you pay attention to details.

Looking forward to seeing the windows in the half circle… etc.

Thanks for posting this.

Frank
 
Above grade the foundation consists of two parallel stone walls with concrete poured between them and leveled off. The foundation took a total of 6 months, just the two of us working on it.

John, I echo what everyone else has said. I think straw bale houses are a cool idea, especially in the arid regions.

But I'm puzzled about your foundation wall... It looks really nice on the outside. But why did you go to all that work for the inside? :dunno: The inside of your foundation is a crawlspace, which you'll never see. Why didn't you skip the inner wall of rock, just put up a plywood form and pour the concrete?

what am I missing.
 
The next installment...

First though, to answer Art's question, time is cheap, concrete isn't. Or at least it didn't seem cheap at the time as I hadn't started buying all that lumber yet :D
About 3/4 of the stones we used came from our site, the rest we picked up locally where ever there's been road work.

First photo is loading strawbales up in Colorado last march. Man was it windy, well you can tell. My truck normally gets between 5 and 8 mpg, depending on the load, we got about 3 until we got back into New Mexico and the wind dropped to a mere 40 mph.

First course of bales on the floor shows a bit of how its put together, bales are notched to fit the posts that will hold the roof up. There's a beam of 2x10's on the top of the wall, and we tried a method of strengthening the wall where the posts are about an inch shorter than the stacked bales. The bales are compressed using a load strap from the truck, and once the beam is on the posts, the whole thing is fixed together with 1/2" steel pallet strapping so the load strap can be removed. Even so, the bale walls settled enough on their own over the next six months that there are gaps between the top course and the beam. I think if I built about 5 more of these, the last one would have all the bugs worked out :doh:

Finally got to do some regular framing! Last pic is the curved wall that we decided to frame up, due mainly to its height (12'), and also to make that room a bit larger.

Next installment will be adventures in roofing. I'm headed out to Tucson for a few days next week so it'll be next weekend before I get to it.

Just saw Bruce's post, we're in Corona, just a little southeast of the center of the state.
 
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Thanks for starting this thread, John. I have a nephew who's worked on a few straw houses, and from his descrition it sounds like a great concept. This will be a fun thread to watch, so keep the pics and descriptions coming. :lurk:

Like Bruce, I also recognized the sky in your pics. (Ex-ABQ native) I've been through Corona several times...you're out in the land of wide open spaces for sure. :thumb:
 
Frank,

The book we used most, and as a good overview and intro is "The Straw Bale House" by Athena & Bill Steen. A little old perhaps, but still a good book. I also used "Strawbale Details" by Chris Magwood & Chris Walker, mostly when drawing plans. It has a lot of drawings of different construction details that are good for stimulating the thought process even if you don't use any of them directly. I also like "The Natural Plaster Book", though I'm going to end up using conventional stucco & mesh.

Probably the most helpful thing we did was to visit the Steen's in Patagonia on one of their open house days. They had several buildings made by different methods and that helped shape our design to some degree. The other thing that influenced our design are the New Mexico code requirements for straw bale buildings. Here they have to be of a post and beam construction with straw bale infill. In Tucson, where we lived while planning the house, the local code required the bale walls to be load bearing. The Steens are advocating a hybrid design that I described in another post, where the bales are compressed partially. I still prefer this method, but it can be a bit tricky to get it right. There might be more discussion of this method in some of the Steens' newer books.

John
 
Whatcha gonna do Frank, build a Straw shop down in Tucson?
Nope Don,
Have a steel building for a shop there. Will post pics as soon as I change out ancient cd rw for newer dvd player, which will be able to read discs I downloaded my camera card to at a Walgreen’s when last on the road. Yes, slow, aren’t I?

Thanks for the book recommendations John! Will order soon. On the subject of Code, yes, it does help people hone new engineering designs, but it also reminds me of something Gary Snyder said many years ago about rebar being required in adobe walls… to paraphrase; “…and five thousand years from now archeologists will wonder what made those funny red holes in the adobe walls”.

Have a good trip to Tucson.

Frank
 
John, I am really enjoying this thread and learning from it. Thanks for starting it.

As for your comment: "I think if I built about 5 more of these, the last one would have all the bugs worked out ". That has been true for me with just about every type of construction that I tackle. I like to "help" folks and make mistakes on their projects in order to reduce the number of mistakes that I make on my similar projects (notice that I said "reduce", not eliminate").
 
Finally re-sized some more...

Tonights installment is "Trusses, or the One Day Roof".

This was a bit of an adventure, as I'd never built a roof this way before, or hardly at all other than the odd shed here and there. Fortunately we had lots of help from friends and nieghbors.

First picture shows how you move 30 or so trusses 500' up a hill with just two people. Now if only I'd gotten some duct tape on that thing somewhere!

The next morning we're out working hard, and trying to avoid the camera. Thats me hiding behind the brace board. We'd gotten about an inch of rain the night before, so I was kinda grouchy and worried about the straw. This was last June, right at the start of the rainy season. We got something like 17" last summer, and turns out the straw is fine.

Next picture is the guys lifting a truss the hard way. We'd done about 25 at this point, and I still couldn't get the concept of rolling a truss through to them. Maybe I wasn't trying to hard, as they seemed pretty happy doing it this way.

The next three are all the truss work done, and the sun shining!

Last is the conical part a week or so later. There's that lead grey sky again. This part took some figuring, and about a week to build, so of course not a single pie section is the same as another. When we did the facia boards on that part, all the miters were different too. Still, it looks nice.
 
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Thanks for the update, John. I like your truss-hauling rig. I think it qualifies as 'handy' even without the duct tape. ;)

Looks like you've got a real pretty lot to build that house on. So...if these pics were in June, did you get it buttoned up before the snow this winter?
 
John

Thanks for this post, it is very interesting! Don't think the local codes would go for this in hurricane land though!

The "truss-mobile" is very cool!

Do you have to worry about the bales getting wet before they are stuccoed?

Jay
 
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