A developing technology, strawbale construction is continually being refined and developed. Here John describes the method he used for a cottage on a concrete slab with loadbearing walls. Introduction It is now nearly ten years since we first started looking at building in strawbales. We saw our first strawbale building at Bill Mollison’s property at Tyalgum and bought the video as well as the Strawbale Book by Steen, Steen and Bainbridge. A lot has happened in that time and the methods of building in strawbales have improved significantly. We have used many methods including the Blue Bag method of compression from Canada. My personal preference has always been loadbearing with all sizes of bales from standard to jumbo. This usually means that the building is small and there is nothing wrong with that. However, with the use of jumbo bales you can design and build large homes and commercial buildings loadbearing style without fear. Bill and Athena Steen had been working on Poem’s house (Athena’s sister) and they published their work on their web site. In particular, this page. We liked the method that Bill and Athena were using on this house. It was a hybrid method similar to one used by Barbara Jones of Amazon Nails in the UK. So we went about using the best of both methods and coming up with a hybrid method that suited our work. We designed two strawbale homes for two of our clients and both had different foundations. One was on a concrete slab and the other on piers, bearers and joists. I will describe the hybrid method that we used for the cottage on the concrete slab here by way of photographs as a photo tells a thousand words as you know. In essence we have used the loadbearing technique and used the window and door frames of the building to be the frame that locks in the top plates to the bottom plates. The method uses continuous thread rods that are used for the pre-compression as well as locking in the frames to the top plates. Summary We built the hybrid strawbale cottage ready to lock up and roof in ten days with a five-day custom workshop and some 15 students. The building has a loft, a bedroom and a bathroom, which were built after the workshop by a carpenter. The final coat of render was applied by our client and some of her friends. We love this method and it has many advantages over any of the systems we have used. We will be using it for all the buildings that we build from now on, from a large house in Victoria using standard bales to a jumbo bale factory we are building for ourselves here in Ganmain. |
