Straw Bale Construction

Day 2 | Strawbale Retrofit

As you know we are in love with Straw Bale Construction.  We’ve already owner built our straw bale extention and now we are about to undertake a retrofit of the existing ‘cottage’ part of our home.

We’ve been waiting for the weather to get better – we don’t want water getting into the cottage when we start work and of course now it’s warmer and drying and the grass is growing so fast we can hardly keep up we realise that we’ve still got a lot of thinking to do.  There is one thing about Straw Bale Construction that you always want to remember.  Staw and Water are NOT the best of friends, so keep them dry at all costs.

We know our floor plan – we’re going to move some non-loadbearing walls and take our ‘wet’ rooms from the sunny side of the place where we really want to sit on a cold winters day and GP even built a model so we could see exactly what the spaced looked like.  I’t brilliant and it does more for us than I thought it would.  We’ve adjusted our thinking a bit since he built it and you can position it to see where the sun comes in and where doesn’t – might just make one of the windows a little bigger – might just put those french doors over here to access to the outside a little more sensible… good value.

BUT where do we start?

Here is just one of our conversations -

“I could probably put in that last post for the verandah – but that means extending the fascia board, which means taking off the guttering.”  Sounds fair right?  “However, if it rains that will give us a really big drainage problem at the back of the house and we already have a bit of a drainage problem there.”  Hmmm should we tackle that first?  “We really should get all that water stuff sorted first and get the retaining wall done as the cut is starting to deteriorate a bit, so that means getting Tim the Digger Man back, clean up the back so the water drains where we want it to drain and then see if Charlie can give us a hand with the wall”.  Good sorted…. but wait… “What do we do with all the water then?  We’ll have to get some drains dug while Tim is here – they can come down the other side of the house, past the shed and across the drive into the big pond”

That’s what we’ve decided to do ‘first’ – we started on the far Eastern corner of the cottage and ended up at the big pond on our Western boundary – all the while going almost full circle around the house!

Well at least now we have the beginning of a plan.  I guess that is one of the pitfalls of doing it ourselves, of being DIY / Owner Builders.  I’m sure a professional would have been on top of this in five minutes but it took us all weekend to figure out that we had a problem, discuss some of the possible solutions, realise the ramifications of our ideas and develop what seems like a reasonable course of action… all because we thought we could put a verandah post in!

So – planning can be both hard and easy in Straw Bale Construction as in any other kind of building construction.  Take your time, have the conversations and don’t leave it until the last minute to do it.  We could have spent all winter thinking about this but didn’t.  Wasted opportunity.

Straw bale construction isn’t for everyone, is hard work, is fun, is satisfying and you will meet some amazing people along with way.

If you are thinking about doing this, check out the Resources Page and see if there is something useful there to help you get started.  If you can’t find what you are looking for, leave me a comment and if I know anything useful I’ll get back to you.