A 24'x18' straw bale lodge

[Drew]

That makes good sense, John.  We're already on the sixth course, so I might not reach the bottom three.  Hmm...

The Freshman Farmers thing is pretty cool.  Dan and I are different than the other folks, but I guess that is part of what makes it work.  We have a lot of soil prep to do this fall to get ready for a season of good planting.  Our test field did okay, but the clay is a bear.

And footwear?  Tactical boots!  I got some from Amazon and they work great.  No slipping and tough enough for rocks and snakes.  They're a little tedious to lace up on a cold morning, so my next pair might be the kind with zippers.

"For goodness sake, take care of your feet!" - Lieutenant Dan

[Drew]

Ever see one of those prison break movies?  The con has smuggled in a spoon and uses it over the course of 30 years to dig a tunnel.  That's what the last couple months have been like on this.

The bales were great!  Dave, Dan, and I stacked and had a lot of progress over a short period of time.  Then came the wood work between the rafters and the top of the bales.  Get up early, drive three hours, fight with the twisted rafters at bad ladder angles, drive another three hours to go home, and scare the people at the Marysville Jamba Juice (That homeless family is back again!  They're bathing in our restroom!). 

Tedious. 

This is my dad.  He's really allergic to rice like most people are allergic to CS gas.  So he comes to work on my rice straw bale with a pollen mask on.  If it was only pepper spray he wouldn't have bothered.



The peach tree up and got shothole fungus.  The test field is producing a few veggies and a lot of information.  "Okay, so the rabbits like everything but the basil.  And potatoes will grow in the clay, but harvesting them is a less than fun.  Yellow Star Thistle likes the edge of disturbed soil..."

So it's real.  On the good side we've figured out how to have a productive day when the temperature goes from 85 to 106 over the course of the day.  I sweat like a coffee filter, but bandanas are really cool.  We haven't seen a snake all summer but never stop looking for them.  I learned a lot of stuff about evapotranspiration and can make 200 gallons of water go pretty far over 17 trees and a test field.



This weekend all four of us were at the place to finish up the wood and lath work and start the stucco.



The first batch of 15 bags got the kids almost all the way around the building.  I also have a pretty good idea of how fast a team of two can trowel stucco on lath and straw and what the coverage is like.  We have a stucco sprayer and I want to rent a bigger compressor to use with it.  I'll get 45 80# bags and see how things go.  With a two person spraying crew and one mixing we'll probably still have a lot of downtime. But it will probably be faster than trowling.



Dave goes off to the University of Alaska at Fairbanks on Sunday, so this was his last weekend at the farm for a while.  We are sure going to miss him around the place.  For all the building he has learned to do, he still pitches his tent outside at the end of the day.



These are the bale staples we used.  We made them from high tensile wire we got at Home Depot.  It was about $17 for 170 feet and we could make them any size we want.  Since we need about four rolls for the outside, it was a good idea.





It puts the lotion on or it gets the hose again.



Oroville is a weird town.  A bunch of the restaurants we went to were closed on Saturday night.  Are they mob fronts?  We did find a Mexican place that was open that we liked.  When you're vegetarian and you get out of the big towns, Mexican food is one of your good bets.  It's also good if you need some money laundered.

[glenn kangiser]

Looking great. Drew. 

If I had that high tensile wire and straw bale walls I would make me some Spiderman claws or maybe Wolverine claws and climb them.

[Drew]

That would make it a heck of a lot easier to work up top then a ladder.

[Bishopknight]

My friend Joe and Julia who built their own strawbale house ( picture of it below ) helped me parge this weekend. He said he applied the same trick he used on his house. Take a 12"x12" hawk , put about 5 lbs of mud on it, then put the hawk up against the bale and blade the mud upwards off the hawk. It takes some strength but its incredibly fast and effective. I watched him work blazing fast on my wall. Hes in the 2nd pic. Their house is absolutely beautiful.



Here he is using the hawk and trowel.

[Drew]

That's a great idea, Bishopknight.  We've also been using small redwood trowels (?) but a bigger one should work better and woudl be easy to build. 

Beautiful house, too!  I like the greenhouse off to the side.

[glenn kangiser]

The hawk is a good way to do it also, Drew.  I taught a friend to do it on his stucco fence.

I'd still like a set of those claws though.

[Bobmarlon]

I have done similar work spreading concrete onto metal lathe and the method we found the fastest was to have one person shovel small amounts of concrete continuously onto another persons hawk and have them spread the concrete in a rhythm.  When the wheelbarrow runs empty you both stop and mix it together then switch off on spreading.

or hire a shockrete truck and just spray the whole thing

[Sassy]

I did a lot of that, too.  Had to mix my own stucco in the mixer, pour it out in the black plastic cement pan ( don't know what it's called) then used the hawk & I liked to use the rubber lathe - just seemed easier for me.  Did lots of the outside walls, a big section on the roof that kinda looks like a big water slide & the walls beside it & also the arch on the RV garage - got lots of it on my head in the arch    the stuff would fall down on me at 1st before it finally started to stick to the ceiling.  The best stuff I worked with was the plastic cement mixed with sand with some fiber mesh added.  That hawk piled with stucco really builds the muscles 

We'd experimented with some other mixtures using more of the earth plaster with Henry's (looks like tar) & straw - did a bunch of that over straw bales on top of the roof where we had put a pond - also covered the stairs with it.  I had to mix it about 30 feet away, climb up to the top carrying 5 gal buckets - good thing I was a few years younger  - don't think I could do that anymore    The stuff didn't wear real well in the rain - but they were experiments Glenn had read about - he had me try it out   

Coming right along, Drew & family!

[Bobmarlon]

When I used to build swimming pools we would also add A line of Dish soap into the mix it would make the plaster easier to work with.

[Drew]

Dan posted this as one of our weekly blogs on FreshmanFarmer.com.  I want to put it here because I think you folks will know what she's talking about.

Green Construction?

The straw bale ag building is hard to construct.  I mean HARD.  Yesterday found me in sitting in front of the still only partially completed building, cutting umpteen million linear feet of high tensile steel into bale staples, and pondering why we are using straw bale construction.  I mean, what were our reasons for getting into this kind of construction?

"Green" leaps to mind.  This place is supposed to be Green!  That's why we chose this.  That's why all four of us signed up for the Straw Bale 101 seminar up at the Solar Living Institute in Hopland and got all charged up about erecting our next ag building using straw bale construction.  Right?  Or was that it?  I started thinking back to that seminar.

Here's the way the seminar is described:

http://www.solarliving.org/store/product.asp?catid=13&pid=2109

Well, OK, the seminar doesn't really say straw bale is "Green," but it IS listed under Sustainable Living.  Yes, I do think Green is what we had in mind.

And indeed, what could be greener than using this delightful, pure, sweet-smelling agricultural byproduct of the local mega-monoculture, Rice, for a second purpose beyond just holding up the rice heads in the fields?  We would be putting to use something that otherwise would be trucked by the rice farmer to the local incineration site, a double whammy on rice's carbon footprint.  Our alternative would preserve the straw intact, rather than spending petrochemicals to try and convert it into some other form.  The pure unadulterated bales would live soundly inside the walls of our building, in permanent peace.



The first thing we learned in the seminar at Solar Living was that there are all kinds of problems with simple straw bale structures, the kind where you just stack the bales and call it done.  Those are called "load bearing" structures, where the straw bears the load of the roof unassisted by any wood.  These structures are the kind that can be done by the seminar attendees in a couple of days.  They are also the kind that are prohibited by Code in many California counties, and where they aren't prohibited, the county will often require extensive engineering to prove they'll stay standing.

So, we concluded we need to frame our structure with wood.  Strike One against Green, and add several months onto the life of our project for framing, on weekends, three hours from home.  (And let's not even mention the footprint made by our truck on the weekly six-hour round-trip commute for framing work.)



"Well," said we, "we can at least minimize our use of Demon Cement, by using pier and beam construction for our foundation rather than pouring a cement pad!"

Great!  no concrete in the foundation!



Well, almost no concrete.  We've achieved a Green advantage!

Au contraire!  Because we next learned, when planning ahead for our lovely earth plaster that we'd learned how to mix and apply (in the idyllic afternoon sun, adjacent to the organic garden) in the Solar Living seminar, that you actually have to MINE the earth plaster from the earth!  And our earth is HARD!



Also, we do not want a gigantic hole left behind from where the earth was taken.  The alternative, to essentially strip mine the earth, is definitely AntiGreen.  There ARE guys out there who mine their own earth for earth plaster, and one of them offered to give us some.  We'd need many truckloads.  We would have to drive VERY far.

So, stucco.  Suboptimal.  First, it inhibits the ability of the bale walls to breathe, which they're really supposed to be able to do in order to maintain best permanent health.  And, second ... It's made of cement!  Demon Cement!



What's the Green scorecard like?  We are getting Ds.  And, the project hasn't taken a weekend or even a couple of weeks like the freestanding, loadbearing, earth plastered little bale building that's so rosily described on so many websites.  Rather, we are in our second year and barely going to make completion before this year's rains if we're lucky.

And there are more ways our project is jeopardizing the Green agenda!  The thing needs tools — lots and lots of special tools that we don't already have!



Acquiring each tool requires a mindful act.



Sometimes we forget to act mindfully.  Many tools have made a long journey before arriving at your local Home Depot or local independently-owned hardware establishment.



I recall how Drew and I had spent 20 minutes earlier that morning selecting a hose nozzle to replace the broken one, looking at about 20 different models — 1 made in USA, 2 made in Taiwan, the rest made in China.  And the only model made on the same continent (presumably) as our project has no cool features, just one lever to squeeze for one kind of spray.

This kind of thinking makes my head want to explode and makes me feel weary.

"Doing will fix that," I think, and I stand up to do.

Dan

[glenn kangiser]

Thanks, Drew and Dan.  Good story.

[Sassy]

Well, at least you're trying    you won't have to spend so much money or the earth's resources on heating or cooling with those thick straw walls 

[Drew]

Hi Sassy,

The walls are great, but the roof is still sheathing and tar shingle.  Black tar shingle.  That makes it hotter inside than out right now.  Once we dry in we're going to insulate the ceiling and that should make things better.

It is good to have done this.  I am happy to see that our trash pile is really very small considering the size of the project.  I also managed to screw up my math when sizing the floor sheathing order and edned up with twice as much 7/8" OSB as I needed.  We've found many places to use it and the stack is getting shorter.

"Your mother's coming to dinner tonight and we don't have enough plates."

"Cut up some of that OSB."

"Great idea!"

[glenn kangiser]

...also goes well slathered in sweet cream butter and fried, Drew....

[Drew]

We're definately in the short strokes now.  Considering we broke ground in December of 2007, I guess that's true.  We're just about to finish the first coat of stucco.  That involved a lot of papering, lath, bale staples, mixing, hauling, spattering, etc.

So I'm looking at my doorway and thinking I could use an opinion or two on the best way to finish it.  I want to do it right so I don't get water coming in.  I have a 2' roof overhang, but no awning.  Y'all can see it in the pictures.

I have the door placed and shimmed in the rough opening.  I would like to have the stucco come up all the way to the inside edge of the door frame if I can instead of capping off with wood.  I was thinking of applying the same sticky, two sided window flashing I used on the windows, then putting the double layer, water resistant black peper over that.  Then I'd staple lath on that and stucco.  The layers would all come up to the inside edge of the door frame.

Should I use some different or supplemental type of flashing on the door frame?  I'd rather keep it simple if I can.

Some lonely stucco contractor came over to the blog at Freshman Farmer and got a little nasty.  "I hope you like mold" was his contribution.  Dan and I had never tried mold before, but now that we have, it goes on our granola every morning.  Poor manners aside, I understand the importance of proper stucco application at the portals.  I feel confident with the windows with my flashing and vinyl flanges. It's this wood frame that has me nervous.  Any ideas?

Thanks!

[Drew]

"We're definitely in the short strokes now." - October 5, 2009

Almost three months later and not a bit of let-up, but I'm calling it.  The thing is now a livable structure and is done.  Mostly.  Sort of.

It's dried in and we can sleep in it in the rain.  It needs front steps and the application of two measly bags of finish coat stucco and some paint, but that will happen when the aforementioned rain lets up.  We can work inside listening to classic rock and eat dinner and read listening to Mozart and Vivaldi.  It has straw bale walls and no roof insulation yet, so the heat leaves like it was in a chimney.  The inside walls need finishing, but I want to check their moisture this winter with my bale probe before we seal them up.

But God, is it beautiful to us.

 

Dave is home from college this month.  Last weekend we built a "kitchen counter" (a 29" tall platform table you can cook on, then move out to eat on).  I can open the window behind it and run the cast iron burner.  After we get this year's crop in I think I'll put in a sink with a gray water drain.  Plenty of time for that later.



We also built a queen size platform bed I designed.  The rim joist (for the lack of a better name) is 6' off the ground which is plenty tall for runts like Dan and me.  It's low enough below the ceiling and saves a ton of room.  We're not quite sure what will go under it, but there is no shortage of uses for space.  A honeypot is high on the list.  Pinball machine is low.

You can see the handle of the scythe I got Dan for Christmas in the picture.  She took it out for a spin yesterday and loves it.



We get up top using an aluminum ladder, which is a bit amusing in the middle of the night.  We also used the ladder for the stucco work, so it is pretty rough on the bare feet.  We'll be coming up with some other option soon enough.

The place will get the recycled cotton bat insulation for heat retention and the silvered pad stuff for heat reflection.  The summer had the place going like an Easy Bake Oven.  The Big Buddy propane heater is nice, but the joint cools off fast when it goes off and I don't like running it all night.  Aside from the CO issue there's moisture to contend with.

My dad gave us a burn barrel.  I love that thing!  Dan does too, which is even better!

Lighting is done with clamp lamps for now.  We had two Xantrex portable batteries (the smaller ones) with us this two-day trip, neither of them fully charged.  We had enough juice for lights and music from Dan's iPod and JBL speaker ring.  If I had the bigger 60 Ah battery charged we'd be good for a lot longer and could run most of the power tools too.



Back when this place was only on paper, I spent quite a bit of time thinking about roof designs.   The shed roof was the easiest, but did not provide the second floor loft.  The gabel roof would give us the loft, but we had a hard enough time with the roof on the 10'x12' shed to try to do it by ourselves on this project.  A gambrel roof? A-hahahahahaha!  Hoo!  Not gonna happen.  So I satisficed with the shed roof and realized I was really glad I did:

1.    It was all we could handle in terms of rafters, sheathing and roofing between three adults.

2.    We barely got it covered in time for two rainy seasons.  Anything more complicated and we would have had expensive trouble.

3.    We got a tall 10' wall out of the deal.  Very pleasing to the eye.

4.    We actually got small lofts on the ends;  One for bedding and one for wood.

While the place is not done, this phase is finishing just in time.  We plan to plant more fruit trees and dry farm some tomatoes and plant some basil to go with them as a companion crop.  We want to spend more time growing than building this year.  Our cover crop is in but the hoop house to start the tomatoes needs to get built as well as the rabbit fence and the deer fence (Two separate fences.  Cool design.).  We're even going to try and do it with the same old 200 gallon water tank instead of putting in the new one this year.  We'll see how that goes.  It looks good on paper.

I've seen farms with straw bale buildings, but I've never seen one with two.  This project has been a tremendous teacher and the "learnings" have been transferable.  We've got more to do on this building, but I think this is the last of the big projects for a while.  We'll be working on growing and fences and a solar system and stuff like that, all in support of building the soil and creating some food.  Or a disco.  I haven't decided yet.

[MountainDon]

   Drew. What a way to bring the year to an end!

[glenn kangiser]

That is great Drew.  Nice to see you can move in.  As for the inside wall coverings - it seems to be customary to add a truth window to straw bale structures.  You could stick your little probe in that...

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Truth_window_02_Pengo.jpg

Seems that the ceiling and maybe floor insulation should take care of the heating and cooling problem, as the strawbales are around R50.

[Drew]

Happy New Year, guys.  Thanks for the kind words.  I've been drawing designs in my notebook for the loft bed and the stairs and looking back at the early drawings.  There has been a lot of time going into this.   And except for the math error I made on floor sheathing that had me buying twice as much as I needed (it is still finding good uses), my scrap pile is amazingly small.

I remember hearing about the truth window, Glenn, and plan to put one in.  I was concerned over the southeast corner that faces the predominant winter winds.  I didn't get it all the way closed up before the first rain and some got in.  I have moisture readings on all the walls but want to make sure they go down and I haven't missed any seams before I close it all up and can't take all the readings (I take 12 points on a wall).  The worst is 20% in that one corner.  As long as it falls or doesn't get worse, I'm happy.  Maybe if I let the wall stay open on the inside in the dry season maybe it will dry out a bit more.  Any thoughts in this regard?  Either way, it gives me the excuse to wait until after I have my trees and veggies in the ground.

We want to do the recycled denim for the roof insulation.  It's more expensive, but with the loft bed up that high and just working with the stuff I would prefer it to the fiberglass.  The 5.5" stuff is rated R21 and the 8" is rated R30.  We'll install the radiant barrier too.  For the underside we'll probably go with fiberglass since the runs are straight and we won't live up against it.

12:42 am on the first day of the year.  I wouldn't be up for this except that Robin is out at a NYE party and needs a ride home. 

[RainDog]

What I find fascinating and enlightening about this thread and Drew's whole experience is how much plain old work is involved with a project like his. I strongly suspect that many people who are drawn to straw bale construction are simply intimidated by stick framing, and use the "green" label as cover. This thread shows perfectly how difficult it can be using unconventional methods of building, and how one has to really be able to think on their feet to manage it. It ain't just stackin' up some hay, is it? 

[glenn kangiser]

Open is probably better than closed, Drew.  Hay bales commonly are tarped top only and side moisture is not worried about and doesn't cause damage, but it is open for the duration also.

Do you know what the moisture content that will cause damage is?

Raindog, I have a wall that is just plain stacked about 14' high in my greenhouse separating the greenhouse from the shop.  It has a few boards in critical places to prevent it from toppling over.  It is not all pretty like Drew's.  

From what height is a falling bale fatal?

Industry has pretty well seen to it that alternative building can be made to cost more than conventional building if you hire it out.

[Drew]

RainDog, there is a lot to what you say.  We are not contractors, though we had built a 12'x10' gable roof shed before this and had a taste of what we were getting into.  The two-day course in Hopland at the Solar Living Institute barely touched the surface, though a good start.  It's been two years since we took the course (It happened in September 2007 and we got our permit in November 2007).  We built the irrigation system during the winter of 2007/08 when the mud was too thick to work in, and we tarped the work and did field prep for the winter of 2008/09.  We've had any number of weather related "pushes" to get it done before the rain/heat came.  I have the class email list here somewhere and plan to send folks over here to show them how it went.

The green aspect is counterbalanced by the fact the bales were not tilled back into the farmer's soil and the concrete we saved on a foundation was put into the walls in the form of stucco.

If all I wanted was a building I could have done it cheaper.  If you assign apprentice wages to our hours (And that would be the honest way of doing it), account for fuel for the 6-hour round trip each weekend, and the cost of materials (To be fair, waste was really low), it might have been cheaper and much faster to put an office portable or a Home Depot "cabin" in place.  But in addition to a building, I got the following out of this:

1.  Tool skills.  The tricks I know now can only come from endless repetition.  As Mr. Miagi said, "Wax on, wax off." I can also move with greater safety and confidence on a ladder or a roof.
2.  My son developing his skills.  Since we bought the farm almost five years ago when he was 14, we went from, "Wake up, Dave!" to stopping and listening when he said, "Hey, I have an idea."  His ideas on clever ways of using our materials have saved us hours of labor many times.
3.  Working well with my dad and wife.  There's a book in this somewhere.
4.  Righteous pain.  I go back to my cubicle on Monday (If I am lucky enough to have work) and feel it in my shoulders, legs, and arms.  Maybe a few barked knuckles.  Bueno.

The maximum moisture level is 20%, Glenn.  Though I have been using a 2-prong grain probe rather than a bale needle.  The readings I'll get will be higher because of the tightness of the bale.  Still, I suspect that a bit of the water that came in did so at the side of a bale high up on the wall and has been falling down slowly to the bottom.  The bales sit on a base of two PT 2"x4"s with gravel in between them, so the  water has a place to go if it falls down.

Lethal height for a bale?  Those awkward blocks don't need much to bend and snap something fragile.   

[rick91351]

From what height is a falling bale fatal?

Industry has pretty well seen to it that alternative building can be made to cost more than conventional building if you hire it out.

When the hay bales subject came up a short time ago about bales surrounding shipping containers; my main concern was them tumbling down and hurting or killing kids, adults and pets.  The bales today are very solid, and not uncommon for them to weight in the 100 plus pound range.  These are common string tied bales baled with the newer inline balers.  This was something that was only done with wire ties not that many years ago.  So there is an inherited danger with this type construction.  Certainly they should be netted or banded in the upper layers to prevent this.    
           

[Drew]

You bet, Rick.  We tied the bales to the frame with nylon twine.  The inside and outside are covered with wire stucco lath and stapled with steel staples we made.  They ain't going nowhere.

We had a few extra bales left over (You're supposed to order 10% more to cover cut bales and breakage) and stacked them two high outside.  Once water soaked, these things weigh over 100 lbs. easy.  Telling by the prints in the mud, a neighbor's horse (it could have been a zebra or unicorn, too) came by and knocked them over looking for goodies.