Garage walls up, house slab finished

First of all, sorry that it has taken so long for an update. The only excuse is that Geir's been a bit too tired in the evenings to start writing, or that it has been a bit to cold in the "office" part of our little house to do writing. Winter has come, and we are currently having around 3-13 degrees, but if it is a sunny day, it is rather nice to be outside.

Anyway, work has progressed, and we have now finsihed the house slab (was done ages ago) and the end result (with a few strawbales on top) looks like this:

comments shouldn't really be necessary

In respect of the garage, we managed on Friday to finish putting up all the bales for the walls. It has taken us quite a bit longer than we initially thought it would, probably at least 9 to 10 days of work for the garage, and the main reason for this is that there are a lot of small things that have to be done that takes a lot of time. Our next diary entry will give a picture overview of the strawbaling technique we are using. Putting down the bales is reasonably quick, when there are now posts to think about. But where there are posts we have to cut out notches in the bales to fit around the posts, something that requires a bit of work with the bales. After a full course of bales is laid down, we put down barbed wire on top of the bales, and fasten this around the posts and to the window posts. This barbed wire is really terrible to work with, and takes a very long time, but hopefully it is worth it in respect of stabilising the walls. The wire is then pegged down into the bales, using at least 2 steel pegs per bale.

What has also taken quite some time is the last course of the bales, as this has to fit around the perimeter beams that holds the roof up. The last course is not a full bale hight, thus we have had to use the biscuits in the bales, tie these into the size we need and then using the chainsaw to shape them correctly. This has generally made it possible to get it to the full hight on one side, but not the other, so there we have had to tie a lot of staw together in bundles in order to tie these again to the perimeter beam. At the end, the whole wall is then covered in chickenwire on the sides to help support the sand/limve/cement render we will use on the walls.

But in order to show how this works, here are first some pictures of the garage, then go to the next entry to look at the particular strawbale pictures.

Baling well on the way	Electrical cable in conduit, running between to courses of bales
Workshop section completed - eastern side	Workshop section completed - southern side

We have now actually finished all the walls, but haven't taken any pictures yet. All the outside walls are now also covered in blue tarps as we had rain yesterday and last night. We have also started putting up the chicken wire in the workshop section (on the inside only so far) and will come back with some more pictures soon on the progress. Maybe also some close up pictures so that you can see how the walls will eventually look. They are by no means straight, which for us is actually what we are looking for in a strawbale house. We like the lumps sticking out here and there - which is also a very good excuse if you are not able to get then all straight!!!

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