A Round House of Straw Bales

Enlarge Image Image Gallery The completed house of straw bales on a winter day, hung with icicles. PHOTO: MOTHER EARTH NEWS STAFF

Everything the Power of the World does is done in a circle.... Our teepees were round like the- nests of birds, and these were always set in a circle... But the Wasichus [Whites] have put us in these square boxes. Our power is gone and we are dying....  

-  Black Elk Speaks , p. 199-200  

And they shall not build and another inhabit; they shall not plant and another eat: for as the days of a tree are the days of my people, and mine elect shall long enjoy the work of their hands.  -Isaiah , 65:22  

We figure it took two 40-man-hour weeks to build and cost us a total of $25 . . . and the pleasure of living in a round house that we put together with our own hands has verified Black Elk and Isaiah's thoughts beyond words. Still, in words, we can lay out the recipe we followed . . . just in case you want to construct such a residence for yourself.

Our first step was to pick a spot, put in a stake and—with a 10-foot-long string attached to the post—draw a circle on the ground. (That's a 63-foot circumference . . . we wanted some room. Even this beginning step was simpler and quicker than measuring and squaring the normal rectangle.

Next we cut eight poles about four inches in diameter eight feet long and planted them upright (in holes 20 inches deep) at equal intervals around the circle. By tamping solidly as we filled dirt and stones back in around the poles, we managed to make the uprights fairly stable. At that stage, the house made us think of Stonehenge.

It also made us think of the roof we'd soon be resting on the uprights . . . a roof that would push down and out . How would we contain that outward pressure? Rafters? Buttresses?

The answer was so simple and so round . . . we bound the whole ring of poles near their tops with wire. Baling wire or even heavy twine would have done the job, but we had barbed wire from the dump for free and we strung it up . . . five times around in a tight circle.

Then we notched the tops of the uprights, collected eight more longer and thinner (12 feet by three inches in diameter) poles and notched the out-end of each to fit the uprights as shown.

The center-ends of the roof timbers were then nailed and wire-bound together in a superimposed two-sets-of-four pattern that had a hole in its center for a stovepipe to stick through.