Hay Houses and Straw Buildings: Happiness is a Hay House
(Page 3 of 7)
July/August 1979
By the Mother Earth News editors
Tricks for Using Hay Bale "Bricks"
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When we learned that a friend had extra hay that year, we considered ourselves lucky to pay $200 for 200 bales. However-when we built our shop addition this fall-we found year-old hay selling for 35¢ a bale . . . so such leftover feed is the way to go if it's available. (We also think straw might be even better than hay, because it's mostly stalks and has more dead air space.)
It was, of course, important that the bottom row of hay not get damp, so we laid plastic down . . . put the bales on top of it . . . and then folded the sheets up and over our hay "bricks". Baling twine was used to tie each bale to its "neighbors" . . . and-since we had nailed diagonal braces between some of the outer posts many of the blocks could be attached to a pole as well.
Quickly, in a bricklayer's pattern, the walls went up . . . with lots of loose hay crammed into any open cracks as we went along. There were a number of places-at corners and around window areas-where we needed only a portion of a bale. In such cases we took the hay apart, retied as much of it as we needed, and saved the rest for stuffing.
We didn't have any problem obtaining windows, since we had a lot of old storm and casement units that we'd picked up for a dollar apiece at auctions or "discontinued" sales. We chose the worst of these for the hay house and saved the good windows for our future stone "mansion". But we did need frames that were deep enough to sit on a hay bale, and strong enough to support the 15 to 18 inches of fodder above. We also wanted to "double up" our glass surfaces for extra insulation.
At first, we built 12-inch-deep window frames from rough 2 X 6's. We later decided that this was "overkill engineering", however, so the rest of our units were made from salvaged 1 X 6 lumber. The corners were toenailed, and 2 X 4's were fastened around the inside to hold the two matching frames together and help create a tighter insulating air space between them.
Finally, we wedged the windows in on top of the third row of bales-in pairs, one from the inside and one from the outside-and nailed each frame to a support pole. (When spring came . . . we hinged some of our windows to open either up or to one side, and stapled screens on the outer wooden "borders".)
The door frame was made in much the same way as were the window supports . . . and it surrounded a heavy "double door" that had two inches of styrofoam sandwiched in the middle.
Weatherproofing the Hay Bale Building
We were almost done and glad of it, because the nights in our little shack were getting colder all the time and we didn't like trying to heat the great out-of-doors with our poor Ashley.
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