Southern Comfort in a Straw Bale Home
(Page 4 of 7)
June/July 2004
By Claire Anderson
Although he recalls having some anxiety about acting as the contractor, Elise says she wasn't worried. "I knew I needed a master carpenter who could say the structural systems, the foundation and the post-and-beams were sound," she says. "I felt we had enough knowledge of straw bale that we could make a good, solid home with the right carpenter." And, true to her persistent nature, Elise found the right person, Bill Perry, a master carpenter who lived just down the road.
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Elise and Michael also hired others to help with construction, including Doug Cashman, a friend from Taos, N.M., who helped with the framing and plastering. Masons set the concrete block for the 826-square-foot basement, and Michael followed them, filling all the blocks with rebar and concrete. He originally lugged cement to the blocks in a 5-gallon bucket, but "finally wised-up" and hired a concrete pump truck. "It was the best $300 I ever spent," he says.
Construction progressed quickly. The basement floor was finished in a week, and the framing work got under way the following week. Door and window headers were milled from yellow pine harvested on site.
Massive roof trusses — 45 feet long — were manufactured off site, trucked in and placed by crane. Elise was astonished at the amount of wood they used in their straw bale house. "I couldn't believe it," she says. "Here I was building this straw bale house, thinking that I was saving wood, and then the trusses arrived. In retrospect, I would have designed a simpler roof that required less wood to build.'
The roof sheeting — galvanized metal roofing screwed to purlins — was completed by mid-October.
If you build it, They will come
Elise and Michael found straw bales through their local county extension agent. They timed the cutting to reap the driest harvest, and Michael arranged to temporarily store the bales in a friend's chicken house. "It's crucial to store them properly," Elise says. "People out West don't have to worry about it so much. But that's the secret to straw bale — get the straw dry and keep it dry."
The home's first straw-bale wall raising occurred two weeks before Christmas. Switzer and Culver facilitated the raising and Elise, Michael and a slew of their friends provided labor. Elise says she spent much of her time teaching new recruits the finer points of stacking straw bales, tieing off half-bales and squaring up corners. Both she and Michael say they enjoyed the community-building aspect of straw bale building, although they also admit that it wasn't as efficient as an organized workshop where everyone is on the same schedule.
'We'd just finish having a mini-lecture on tying bales, and a whole new batch of folks would arrive, and I'd have to start over and orient them to the process," Elise says. "But despite the discontinuity in people, we still managed to get almost all the bales stacked in three days."
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