Construction

As you will see from these pages, we have now become very close to realise one of our dreams, namely construction our house using straw bales for the wall materials. This is becoming an increasingly popular building technique, both in Australia and other countries. Our main reasons for choosing straw bales as a building material are the:

1) low energy input of the material, the straw was grown on a farm just about 25 km away

2) high insulation factor

3) ease of work in constructing the walls

4) natural feel of wide rendered straw bale walls

The farm we have has around 15 acres (7 hectares) of farm land and we therefore have plenty of room to build on. The construction process will include the following buildings:

a) Office / Extra bedroom - which was also used as temporary living during the building of our main house. Later it will be used as an area for guests and an office if we ever run our own business from home.

b) Garage / Workshop - an essential for anyone who wants to do some building and furniture making. Geir has had plenty of use of ours, but for making doors, windows, kitchen cupboards, bookshelves, etc.

c) House - which is quite nice to have to live in

d) Shed - currently a container that will be dressed in strawbales to fit with the rest, and with a roof that allowes rainwater collection, as well as solar panels for electricity generation

e) Underground earth cellar - well, we do have the drawings, we just have to find a place to dig a hole where we can get the appropriate drainage, and which is not too far way from the house. Well just have to wait and see what happens on this on.

f) Chook shed - after we are all settled in the house, we may get some chooks and they would need a place to live too. We do have a grand design in mind, with straw bale walls, but it might end up being built on an old trailer which will allow us to have a mobile pen we can move around. Again, we'll just see what happens.

g) Greenhouse - probably way into the future, but it is most likely to be attached to the northern wall of the container turned into shed building. We have loads of recycled windows we can use for the glass, but have to finish the shed first and then think about the design a bit more.

In order for our friends and families (and other interested people) to be able to follow the construction process, we have been doing a building diary. The initial aim was to update this about once a week, but as you will find out if you have a look, this has most certainly not happened. However, it does give a good overview of the various steps we have gone through, in a chronological order, but we will also rework this information into the appropriate building pages, to which we have links above.

If you are interested in building with straw bales you might find these LINKS an interesting starting point in your search. Please email us if you have other links you think should be added to the list.

Any problems, please email webmaster. This page was last updated 24/07/2008