Building an Alternative House Using Strawbale
We moved to southern New Mexico because the NE Oregon weather was too cold for my mom and she would have been housebound for months at a time. Moving to NM made many of our previous options not workable. Building a house out of wood wasn’t practical from my point of view. Wood doesn’t weather the weather in the desert without lots of maintenance. Wood is also much more expensive when it has to be shipped long distances. The change from summer rains and heat to cold and dry in the winter didn’t make a wood home appealing to me, especially since I’d be building it.
We looked into Earthship rammed earth, adobe traditional, cement block and settled on strawbale. After living in the house for eight years, we’re glad we did. I engineered and built the house and Celinda designed the interior layout.
We lived in the motorhome and built the house around it, moving the motorhome forward as the work progressed. Eventually we had a “busectomy” when the last wall was ready to be put in place.
The foundation is three feet by two feet of concrete with two feet of it in the ground. The framing is steel pipe with a horizontal welded steel pipe at the top and a concrete header poured around it. The verticals are on three foot centers, since most strawbales are three feet long. Every second course (bale) has a horizontal rebar welded to all the other verticals in that wall and around the corners into the next wall.
Rebars long enough to go through two bales, plus eight inches above the bale and two feet into the concrete foundation, go through each bale vertically. When the third bale was put into place, another rebar, long enough to go through the next two bales plus eight inches, was welded to the first and the bales were placed on top, with the rebar forced through the bales. All the exterior walls are straw bales, with welded rebar reinforcement. The vertical rebars were welded to the top beam before the concrete bond beam was poured. The roof is steel pipe on two foot centers with plywood and eight layers of plastic and tar paper covered with eighteen inches of soil on top. We tried a living roof but it took too much water.
Originally, the floor was traditional adobe but proved to be too maintenance intensive. After three years I removed the adobe, poured a cement slab and installed ceramic tile. That took about ninety percent of the work out of cleaning and maintaining the house.
We have a studio rental unit that is also strawbale. Both stay cool in the summer with nothing more than a small water cooler in the computer room and rental. We use solar gain heating in the rental and solar gain from a solarium plus the smallest wood stove we could find in the house.
The house turned out to be an alternative, alternative building concept that’s proven to be esthetically appealing. low maintenance, easy on energy and very comfortable to live in.
My mom has passed on and we have many friends and relatives living in the NW. When we move back, I plan to build another strawbale house, using the same basics and techniques I learned when building with strawbale in New Mexico. The one exception will be: I plastered the interior and exterior walls by hand and would use a grout pump, the equipment used to do swimming pools, next time. The plastering was the most physically demanding and time consuming part of the entire construction project and I did at least ninety percent of the work solo. You can see the finished house, I have pictures posted on www.larryRmiller.com and www.adventureman1.com
Contrary to the beliefs of the uninformed: strawbale construction, if done correctly, doesn’t have an insect problem and it’s almost impossible to burn one down. I’ve seen blowtorches directed, close range, at walls and left for forty-five minutes. The only thing that burned was on the surface and in line with the torch. There is no air in the walls, other than the dead air spaces in the stalks of the straw, for insects or fire.
See my article “We Chose Strawbale Construction but the Inner Walls are Made of Paper” for information on what I used to build the inner walls.
