The Strawdio

Fixing the roof battens was lovely work. Once I realised that the gap between the battens was the same as the width of the battens it was so easy to get everything laid out. The only challenge was trying to make sure that the nails made it into the rafter. Once you got a few in you could just follow the lines up. Thanks to those who helped.

The first part of this video shows me trying to get the walls straight and stuffing straw in the gaps between the bales. The second part shows me removing the supports for the roof so that it sits on the bales.

I wasn’t quite sure how to drop the roof. It felt like taking off the supports that held it out would be a very dangerous and risky thing to do with a good chance of disaster.

However the straw was so tightly packed beneath the roof plate that when I took of the supports it hardly dropped at all initially and then gradually sunk down but only really by a couple of centimeters.

All of that is to say that these videos are very dull in the end!

Here’s a short video about how to prepare (or dress) a bale ready to be used in a straw bale building:

This was a good day

The gap between the floor and the roof is slightly too small for 6 bales. This is deliberate, so that it won’t be necessary to drop the roof onto the bales – the roof should already be sitting on the bales when I remove the supports.

I wanted to be sure I could compress the bales enough so that they would fit in the gap, so I did a test:

It worked!