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Strawbale is about energy efficiency – an insulation value averaging R-30. And it likes to have its face to the sun and its back to the wind for warmth and protection like all buildings do.

Strawbale is about structure – bales used to bear the load of the roof (and the snow), or simply used as infill for insulation within another type of structural system: timberframe, post-and-beam and modified post-and-beam including box columns.

Strawbale is about form – it can be shaped in many ways – square, rectangle, circle, domed vault, conical, hexagonal, octagonal, polygon. It can be one-story or more (a five-story straw-bale wall panel system has been used in The Netherlands).

Strawbale is about flexibility, accessibility and adaptability of interiors designed to meet the needs of all occupants over time; interiors with good air flow, natural ventilation and proper venting of air and moisture.

Strawbale isn’t just about its structure and form – it’s about how it feels. Cozy, comfortable, natural, encapsulating you within its thick walls – 14- to 16- to 18-inches thick – giving you a sense of security. No big bad wolf is going to blow this structure down – strawbale has been tested to endure 100 mph winds – and has a burn rate of one to two hours (dense bales have little oxygen to feed fire).

Strawbale isn’t just about building – it’s a value-added market for the grower. Straw bales for building can be made from wheat, oats, rye, rice, hemp, prairie grasses (without forbs) – but not woody, brittle stemmed plants such as alfalfa and other feedstock. Buildable bales should be free of weeds and seed heads; dry with no sign of moisture, dirt, mud, or any contaminants. Bales should be bright and clean, dense and well compacted, trimmed on all sides before stacking to avoid filling voids and holes, and should be handled so that they remain in good condition

Strawbale is about healthy interior environments free of toxins - and placing the structure on a piece of site with little harm done to the land and vegetation.

Strawbale buildings are long-lasting when they have good hats and boots – a sturdy hip roof with wide eaves to protect the walls and take the water away from the sides and surroundings, and a solid foundation wide enough and deep enough to support the loads.

Strawbale can be easy to build depending on the design and other factors by people of any age. It can be economical or custom designed. It can be creative and artistic, innovative and expandable.

Straw-bale buildings can be insured, funded the same as any other building, pass codes, have resale value.

Straw-bale building has been done for centuries and its durability has stood the test of time.

Joyce is a consultant on design and construction, teaches classroom seminars and at hands-on workshops, and is managing editor of The Last Straw, the international journal of strawbale and natural building. For more information, contact Joyce Coppinger, ReBuild Associates, Lincoln, Nebraska, 402.483.5135, and visit www.thelaststraw.org and the TLS blog at http://thelaststrawblog.org.

Load-bearing walls waiting preparation

by Tony Caniglia – Colorado, USA

This technique was developed to reduce the amount of fill with loose straw
or straw/clay required when the bent (rounded) sides of the bales are butted
together. The purpose is to remove the bulge on the ends of the bales so
that the bales are squared up and fit right up tight together.

Prepping the bales before stacking them can help make them nice and square.
Do this somewhere away from the house or building for fire safety, to keep
the dust away from other workers, and to collect the loose straw that will
be created.  Start with a large number of bales. Use a couple of other bales
to help hold one bale stand up on end. With your chainsaw, cut downward a
few inches next to the strings on the end of the bale and move the chainsaw
out toward the edge of the bale.  The bales may have a little roundness
between the strings, so clean that area up, too. Try and keep your chain saw
level, and don¹t hit those strings! Step back to eyeball it to see if the
bale looks square. Clean up 6 to 10 bales, then set the chainsaw down and
flip all the bales over to stand them up on the other end, and do the other
side. You may have to lay the bales on edge and, with a little jump, put
your knee into the bale or hit it with a sledge hammer if it has a curve to
it. You could also lay the bales flat on top of a bench, if you don¹t want
to bend over or want to keep the bale stable (another person working with
you can help make this work easier, too).

You may occasionally hit a string with your chainsaw, say one out of ten,
but it is easy to restring the bale. Just tie another piece of string about
16 inches long to the cut string and make a loop knot on one end. Put the
other end through the loop, crank it down (pull it tight) and tie it off.
Once square, the bales push together better and will help make the walls
more stout with less voids. This means little or no stuffing with loose
straw. When the bales are stacked, grab a 4-ft level, a couple of sledge
hammers (or other ³bale bangers² as you prefer) and get another person to
help. One of you should stand on the inside of the wall and the other one on
the outside of the wall. Smack the bales so they don¹t overlap one another
too much. Focus on getting one side as plumb as you can (for example, work
on getting the inside plumb). Now trim the surface of the bales on both
sides of the wall (inside and out) with a chainsaw or weed whacker. Be sure
to do the whole wall, top to bottom. That will help to finish cleaning up
any overlapping bales and any humps, bumps and lumps. This nice, plumb wall
will make your lathing, netting, plastering and troweling process easier,
not to mention the money you will save in stucco materials! And these
beautiful, straight walls may make your building easier to sell in the
future!

by Joyce Coppinger – Nebraska, USA

Tips about Bales
Why wait until you have the framing done and the roof on before finding
your bales. Find your bales during the planning process and well before you
begin construction. Knowing the size of the bales before you design the
building will help you determine wall spans and wall heights, perhaps saving
some of the cutting and retying of the bales, and can help you decide how to
stack the bales­ flat or on edge. Placement of windows and doors may be
easier to determine. You will even have time to select the best bales to
use, eliminating those that might have weeds and seeds, signs of moisture or
mildew, or aren’t shaped or tied well. For help in finding and buying your
bales, try these web sites:

www.strawlocator.com – At this web site, you can list the specifications for
the bales you need for your project, and you can search the listings of bale
suppliers.

www.hayexchange.com – Remember “hay” is not “straw” when searching this web
site.

www.thelaststraw.org – Click on Back Issues & CD-Rom, then scroll down to
2003 Resource Guide. The highlighted article titled Bale Wisdom-Bale Buying
101 lists 20 tips for buying your bales, information on bale orientation,
bale storage and handling bales.

When you know the size of the bales in the design process, you can
calculate wall heights so that you have full bales in each course,
eliminating the need to fill flakes and cakes at the top of the wall. You
can also calculate the placement of windows and doors so they fit readily
into the bale courses as they are stacked and/or the framing for the windows
can be spaced so a full bale fits under and above the windows and above the
doors.

Trimming the bales to eliminate the bent or folded (rounded) ends will
give you a rectangular unit to work with. All sides of the bale will have
cut stems and, when the bales are stacked, will lock together better­top,
bottom and sides. The triangular hole between bales that occurs when bales
are not cut will be eliminated, so you won’t have to stuff as much loose
straw or light straw/clay fill between the bales and bale courses. (See Tech
Tip, pg 23)

Build our house out of straw?

by Stephen MacDonald – New Mexico, USA

This article appeared in The Baley Pulpit,TLS#7/Summer 1994.

“May we look upon our Treasures, and the furniture of our Houses, and the Garments in which we array ourselves, and try whether the seeds of war have any nourishment in these possessions, or not.”

- from the Journal of John Woolman an 18th Century Quaker

“Build our house out of straw?” When our neighbor suggested the idea as a solution to our housing problem, both my wife, Nena, and I reacted similarly. “You must be kidding!” Even when he showed us a copy of Fine Homebuilding with an article in it by Gary Strang (1985) on a studio built out of straw bales, we were dubious. It was just too weird (images of rotting hay, mouse hotels, and pig stories readily came to mind). The idea was too simple and straightforward to be believed.

Try as we might, however, we kept returning to the idea of it. It did seem to fit our condition: Using straw bales was 1) low cost…we were near broke, having used the last of our meager savings to buy a small piece of land; 2) a way to stay cool (and warm)…having just moved to southwest New Mexico from Alaska, I was scared to death of the heat; 3) fast and physically easy to build…I just couldn’t face the slow, heavy work of adobe; and 4) ecologically sound…besides being energy efficient, a straw-bale building uses a renewable resource (often viewed as a waste product) that was locally available. Done right, building with straw uses very few trees.

In the end, we decided to go for it. Seven years later, we have no regrets. Just the opposite. We didn’t know it at the time, we were not the only ones interested. Through Strang’s article and newly formed friendships with Susan Mullen, a permaculturist and close neighbor, and an enthusiastic Matts Myhrman in Arizona, we learned of a small but dedicated network of straw-bale aficionados. Nor were any of us particularly innovative. The true trailblazers of straw were the folks from the Sandhills of Nebraska who, out of necessity, started a tradition of building their homes out of native hay and straw beginning back in the late 1800s and continuing up through the early 1940s.

The work of the Nebraska homesteaders remains the key. It took a fact-finding journey to Nebraska in 1989 by Matts and Judy Knox, his wife, to finally convince us that we, like most of those early Nebraskan straw-bale builders, could further simplify our technologies by using straw bales as load-bearing walls without the time and expense of poles or posts. We modern practitioners of straw have come to call it building “Nebraska style.”

It is this style of building that has captivated my imagination and been the thrust of our most recent building endeavors. Much good work needs to be done to revitalize the straw-bale building tradition and get it accepted into common practice. Tackling the building codes is part of that work along with trying (and sharing through The Last Straw) new and innovative techniques. I have no doubt in my mind that sooner, rather than later, this Earth will demand it of us.

Nena in front of the MacDonald’s straw-bale home.

Meanwhile, here are some of this straw-bale builder’s rules of thumb.

I. Keep it small. How much space do you really need? Be honest. Be creative with your space. Small is easy to heat and keep cool. It’s easier to keep clean. It takes up fewer of the earth’s resources and takes up less of its space. You finish the job, at a lower cost, so you can devote money and energy to more useful work. If your teenagers need distance, have them build their own outbuilding or addition. They need to learn the skills, anyway.

2. Keep it simple. Control your impulses to make your house a complicated, “artsy” statement. Simple, small and rectangular houses are beautiful when made of straw and other natural materials. Let form follow function. Again, spend all the time and money you saved by being – out in the woods, feeding the poor, or playing with your children.

3. Build it yourself. Trust yourself. You can do it, especially if you build with straw…and especially if you follow rules 1 and 2. Read building books and magazines.

Ask questions of builders. Build it on paper and as a model first. Track the details. Use your common sense. Be creative with your mistakes. Don’t be intimidated by the “experts.”

4. Stay out of debt. Pay as you go. Assemble the parts as you have the money and time.

5. Use local materials. Use more rock and adobe. Use locally milled lumber and poles. Your neighbor needs the work and you need to know firsthand what demands you’re asking of the forests and the fields.

6. Be energy conscious. Build to maximize passive heating/cooling strategies. Superinsulate your ceiling. Stay off the electric power grid if you can. Put up a windmill or use a solar pump. Build a composting toilet. Raise a garden.

7. Make yourself a home. Don’t just build a house, make yourself a home. Learn to be at home. Do no harm.

6 June 2005 Update

It is hard to believe that 18 years have somehow flowed by since Nena and I first built our little house of straw here in rural New Mexico. Two kids fledged, one now married and making his way at the edge of the Adirondacks in New York, the other just back in the United States after months of solo travel through Europe and western Russia.

Our little house continues to do well. We finally added a small greenhouse to the southwest corner of the place, and several years ago built a really first-class outhouse off the shop. I keep meaning to replace the salvaged (and very inefficient) casement windows we have, and one of these days I’m going to get around to finally plastering the outside of my Nebraska-style office/former teenage daughter ‘cabin.’ “Margosh, margosh” as my Mongolian friends would so often say – tomorrow, tomorrow.

Stephen MacDonald lives with wife Nena, son Orien (and co-author with his father of A Straw-Bale Primer), and daughter Aili, in their owner-built houses of straw in Gila, New Mexico. Steve and Nena live their Quaker faith in numerous ways including active participation in The Friends of the Gila River, working to create a cooperative ecosystem-based Gila River Ripiarian Management Plan with all stakeholders. Steve returns to Alaska each summer to continue biology mammology field work in the bush, and touch base with his northern home for over 14 years in the 1970s to early 80s… and stay cool.

“Somehow Nena and I have survived our various mid-life crises, finding new balance as we age and continue along our now 32-year journey together. I am still very much engaged with my work on far northern mammals (now through the Museum of Southwestern Biology), while Nena, having let her nursing license lapse, spends her days here at home.”

[Guest Editor’s Note. Stephen and Nena’s small straw-bale house has been an inspiration to many. It still inspires because it so effectively embodies the basic principles Stephen outlined of what a home should be - a nice place to live in.]

Post Editing Note: If this information is valuable to you, there is much, much more in the published, official version of The Last Straw.  Please subscribe at The Last Straw online.