Week Eight: Intensive week

We finished the strawbales and got to put in the interior walls! We used two different techniques: Strawclay and Waddle and Daub.

We finished prepping the strawbale walls for plaster so we had time to start our interior walls! The door is is waddle and daub (see waddle below), and the other bay is strawclay.


The strawclay wall is on the left and the waddle and daub is on the right (no daub on it yet).

Week Seven: Natural Wall Building (week 2)

Once all the bales were in they had to be prepped for plaster. I never thought I'd hear "sledgehammer" and "level" in the same sentence, but those are the tools to true the walls!


Door and window openings had to be cut (with a chainsaw and cleaned up with a grinder with a chainsaw blade).


Then any spaces between the bales had to be filled with strawclay knots.


The walls were the string-trimmed (weed whacked) to clean them up thre there was a "smooth" face for plaster to adhere to.

Week Six: Natural Wall Building (week 1)

In order to support our strawbales- and keep them up off the ground, we built a 17" tall pony wall on top of the foundation. Then we had to frame out our windows and doors. I was excited to figure out some carpentry for angles at the doorway!


At all the windows and the door opening we had to put caulk and tar paper and expanded metal lath. This blocks moisture from getting into the strawbale wall and the lath helps the plaster coat to hold on

On Wednesday we had some strawbales brought over from where they are being stored under cover on campus and we got to bailing!

This is the corner I've been working on- my camera batter died at the end of Friday- I'll get more pics next week!