Some days I think we're crazy for building a straw bale house.. other days I KNOW WE ARE!!! You might remember that last fall when we started the bale walls we had to finish up in rather a hurry as the weather turned rather nasty and cold and we NEEDED to heat the trailer with the wood stove in the entrance. So we slapped the last few bales into place and said we'd fix it later.. well Later arrived recently... Here are some before pictures just so you can see the difference!
This wall was the worst! The top 3 levels of bales are leaning VERY badly!! And above the front door they leaned so bad they FELL OUT twice this winter!! Thankfully Papa was home both times!!
See at the top of the wall where the flakes are not level with the bales?? Oh and you can see, right behind the gray filling cabinet, is where the pole is..but I'll talk about that more later.
I see this picture and I instantly think.. WHAT A MESS!!! The tools in the corner, that orange thing is the cream separator, paper garbage to burn etc etc. It looks a bit better now but not much.. most of this mess needs a home.. and until we get more house built it won't have a home.. just a spot to stay out of the way until it is needed again. Such is life :)
The the board at the top of the wall?? That was one thing we had to cover with straw!!
You can see that the bales are not all flush to the wall sand that there are holes here and there where the straw was not filled in all the way. It looks really rough and shoddy. We took almost everything out of the room, opened the doors and windows and weed wacked the walls with a weed wacker. It made a LOT of dust and thankfully we had blocked the door and window to the trailer with blankets so the trailer did not get too dusty. After the weed wacker did it's job Papa and I fixed the bales so they were flush, fixed holes, and tied up metal lathe to cover the two poles in the middle. We also covered the top board above the window side and pinned it up with screws and lathe.
The weed wacker. While Papa was weed wacking I took the plastic off the outside and pulled all the staples out of the wood in the 1st step to getting the outside done. The kids took the plastic and pulled the staples out of it so we could reuse the plastic again.
Here is what it looks like now.
You can see in this picture above the area where the pipes go into the wall where the pole is. We stuffed more straw in there so the wall will be even. The other side wall pole was MUCH worse and we ended up tying lathe onto the whole of the area to keep the straw in, to cover the pole, and make the wall smooth.
The windows are ready to plaster. There is a nice curve from the outside edge of the bale to the window sill. Papa did a great job of getting them all the same!
Ok it's a little hard to see the hard work we did to the walls after weed wacking... I guess I'd better take a few close up pictures. IF you look close you can see the stitching on the metal lathe that holds it to the bales. This is done with a bale needle that Papa made..
The notches in the end hold the twine and then you push it through a bale and the twine goes through the bale :) Papa and I stitched the lathe on with one of us on the outside and the other on the inside. We felt a little like the mice in Cinderella. Papa was on the outside and he tied them off tight so that there wouldn't be any bulges and the lathe would stay in place.
At the end of the day we'd gotten the inside pretty much ready to plaster. We still need to ready the outside and week wack it before we can plaster anything as we will need to use the bale needle on the outside as well. The straw bale walls sit on a 4X4 board and the lathe has to cover this 4X4 as well.. we did not have a tool for cutting large pieces of lathe easily so we did not get that done on this day. Papa needs to cut the lathe into strips and then it is just a matter of stapling it to the 4x4's. Easy :) and can be done the day we plaster. After we got everything done Papa took the air hose to the bales and BLEW out the whole addition with it!! DUST FLEW!! Then he took the shop vac and vacuumed up what was left. He managed to get it quite clean.. a LOT cleaner then I thought he would which was a HUGE blessing to me. The trailer had a pretty good layer of dust as well but not nearly what the addition did.
Oh and I wanted to mention that E, our little asthmatic, did not have a reaction to the dust!! YAY!!
