The Strawdio

The next step is to apply a proper layer of clay to the outside of the building. This is important mostly to prevent rodents and other creatures from getting into the clay. It also gives a base to attach the cladding to (using noggins):

In summary:

This shows the process in more detail. First I had to cover the timber with woodfibre board, so that the clay would stick to it. I should have done this before I added the clay slip! Then I oovered it with a good layer of pre-mixed clay. The next day or so I would go over it and smooth it out and add the noggins for the cladding.

It was good that I did the outside of building first, which would be covered by the cladding, as it gave me a chance to learn how to plaster in a way that no one will ever see!

Thanks to everyone who helped:

Now the tiles are on the roof, the straw has been compressed enough to start plastering. The first step is to trim the bales. I used a tool called a Garden Groom for this job:

The clay plaster slip is a layer of pure clay, which gets the straw ready to recieve the next layer of plaster. Using pure clay makes the straw sticky. In hindsight I think we used too much clay in this layer:

Now the battens are done it was time to lay the tiles. This was a two stage process – firstly the tiles were loaded onto the roof to spread the weight evenly. Then the tiles were laid on the battens. The first row of tiles needed to be half size and I didn’t have enough, so I made them by cutting concrete tiles with a mitre saw – not much fun!

The rest of the laying was very fun – its immensly satisfying work. Every fifth row is nailed, so those ones are a bit slower, but the rest of the tiles go on really fast. Once they were on it really transformed the building and made it look like a proper structure. Because the tiles were reclaimed it even looked quite old!

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!