Strawbale Building Part 2

After a long week of work, we actually got to get the first coat of plaster on the building this last weekend. It's been a lot of hard work and a real education, we've learned many things that we'll do differently if we do this again. Translation - we made a lot of mistakes! Hopefully they are not crucial ones. The building will be kind of ugly but hopefully sound.

Some of the things we've learned -


When putting the bottom pieces of strapping under the toe ups, use longer pieces!

Check, check and check again that the walls are straight. Both the wall itself and the individual bales. Here and there a bale was set a little too far in or too far out. Part of this includes being more aggressive with the weedwacking. My husband was afraid of getting to aggressive. Aside from the corner bales where the strings shows, there is plenty of room for evening up the wall. Not doing this has cost us a LOT of plaster. And the wall will most likely still be wavy.

When putting the tar paper and lath on the window wells, put the windows in first. This was not specified in any of the stuff we watched or read so it must be obvious to everybody else, but I screwed it up. I put the lath and tar paper on before we put the windows in. Then I had to cut out the lath and paper for the depth of the window to make them fit. Same with the door. While we haven't put the door in yet, I am anticipating problems. :(

When you think you have enough landscaping pins (used to attach any wire mesh to the straw) get some more. I bought a box of 1000 and thought that would be plenty for this small of a building. NOT! We ran out and ended up cutting up all our wire hangers to make some more pins.

A lot of people use chicken wire, not impressed. Not matter how much we stretched it and pinned it, a lot of it sagged and it shows in the plastering.

That is a large part of why we did this project, though, for the learning experience. We are thinking of building our house out of straw bales and, while we will probably make plenty more mistakes if we do so, they won't be these ones!

Still, I'm pretty happy with how things are turning out. I think the building will be sound and functional. It's already much cooler when you walk in there.

Here it is, ready to plaster.

Here is the inside also ready to plaster.

This is the very beginning of  plastering on the inside.

And here is the finished, scratched plaster on the inside.

We also got the outside done and covered with tarps to protect it from the sun, wind and rain. Naturally, we have been having high winds and severe thunderstorms. We've had to go out and fix tarps a couple times, but it's doing better than I expected.

Edited:

We are supposed to get quite a windstorm today so we took the tarps down. I took the opportunity to get a couple pictures of the outside as well.