We’ve got some very exciting news to share with you. This fall we’ve been busy behind the scenes, organizing our first workshop for 2015 — a Straw Bale Workshop next July outside of Berea, Kentucky! We’re really happy to be teaming up with Mark Mazziotti again to offer another 7 day course on straw bale construction. This time, our workshop site is a small octagonal straw bale house. It’s an off-grid home being built here in the stunning Appalachian foothills.
We’ve got some very exciting news to share with you. This fall we’ve been busy behind the scenes, organizing our first workshop for 2015 — a Straw Bale Workshop next July outside of Berea, Kentucky! We’re really happy to be teaming up with Mark Mazziotti again to offer another 7 day course on straw bale construction. This time, our workshop site is a small octagonal straw bale house. It’s an off-grid home being built here in the stunning Appalachian foothills.
As you’ve likely already seen here, our straw bale house is for sale at Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage in northeast Missouri. We only recently returned from a six week trip that we took to wrap up all of the finish work on the home. I can happily say that the house is complete now, having received all of the nitty-gritty finish details.
To reflect the newly completed state of the house, I’ve updated the straw bale house sale page, including all of the new features. There’s plenty of new photos to view, too. Check it out and tell me what you think!
Having recently finished plastering the walls of our straw bale house, I have a renewed sense of enthusiasm for using clay plaster. Not that I ever felt ‘meh’ about it or anything — it’s more that I feel so inspired to go further with it than ever before and learn some of the deeper nuances to the craft. Clay plaster is just that – a seemingly simple craft, but full of subtleties, and the difference between an okay plaster and excellent plaster are profound. While I’m satisfied with the plaster work we just accomplished, I feel hungry to go further with it.
There’s a few tricks to plastering walls, including the quality of the base coat, your plaster recipe, and the alignment of the stars. Okay, maybe not that last part… but you get the idea. It’s a lot more than slapping some mud on the straw bales.
Installing shelves in the straw bale walls of your home requires a bit of forethought. With some advance planning, you can design some pretty sweet decorative shelves that are quite sturdy and can be adjusted over time. Here’s a relatively simple plan we came up with to build strong, attractive shelving in our house.
Baseboard is an excellent idea to consider for a straw bale house. It’s not just pretty and decorative, but perhaps more important, it’s functional too. The bottom of the plastered wall is delicate, and a bit of trim protects it from the inevitable sweeping, mopping, or chair leg careening towards the wall.
A couple of days ago, I just got finished installing baseboard in our straw bale house. Having gone through that experience, I have some new ideas for how to install baseboard trim in the future. Here’s what I did this time, and what I’m thinking might work in future projects, too.
Over the past number of years, April and I have strived to live without electricity in our main living spaces. We certainly don’t live without it completely (this website certainly wouldn’t exist then), but we’ve enjoyed a candlelit lifestyle in Gobcobatron and planned the same for Strawtron. Now that our straw bale/timber frame is for sale, however, we’ve decided to go ahead and install electrical wiring in the house. It’s a bittersweet feeling — it’s not necessarily what we intended for the house, but I think it makes the home much more desirable for folks considering it as a possibility for themselves.
Strawtron is now firmly in the solar-powered 21st century, as it is now wired for Dancing Rabbit’s solar grid-tie cooperative.
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Thankfully, we’ve never had to worry ourselves about local building codes, but there are many, many more folks who regularly struggle with codes when attempting to build a natural home in their area. And so the following news is very welcome, not just for those folks, but for a potential ecological/cultural tidal shift, as well. Earlier in October, an appendix on straw bale building was approved for inclusion in the 2015 International Residential Code for one and two-family dwellings. The IRC is basically the foundation for building codes all across the US. Wow!
Plastering straw bale walls is time-consuming, it requires finesse, and it’s definitely something you want to avoid having to do over again, at all costs. Plaster is a barrier to the elements, to moisture, and it’s what will define the aesthetic appearance of your home. I recently appreciated Andrew Morrison’s succinct plastering tips article at Strawbale.com.
If you want a better handle on how to do a successful plaster job on your house, read this! It’s the most technical and critical part of straw bale construction.