Welcome to Professional Strawbale’s very first blog page. For the past few weeks, and a couple to come, we are in Barwite, a locality about ten kms north of Mansfield in Victoria’s North East. At this point, the building has been stacked, with 320 bales of rye straw, and the first coat of render is on and dry.
Firstly, I would like to mention the straw. Sourced from a farm a kilometre or two up the road towards Mansfield, the straw has come from a paddock grown for feed harvesting, and though technically not a cereal crop, it fulfilled all the requirements of a building bale in that it consisted of long, tough ’straws’, thus trapping the air required for great insulative value. It was however, extremely dirty, and hard to work with because of the dust trapped in the bales. The process of cutting the bales with a chainsaw and whipper snippering after they had been stacked was very dusty, and required a dust mask – not pleasant in hot and humid conditions. Strictly speaking, a mask should be used when cutting straw, as the cell walls of grasses have a high level of crystalline silicates (giving them their inherent rigidity) which we now know can do serious damage to your lungs. So, if you are sourcing and stacking the bales for your house, try to make sure they are as clean as possible, but wear a mask anyway. Safety first!
All this leads me to say that the whipper snipper work on this building was more rigorous than usual as the owner builder had only allowed 35mm for the render, meaning that tolerances were tighter than average, and in order to avoid thin spots in the render, a fairly heavy cut-back of the straw on the outside was necessary. At a guess, I would say it took two full working days to whipper snipper the surface of the walls to prepare for rendering.
If you are an owner builder, or an owner who wants to stack their own straw prior to getting a professional to do your rendering, don’t skimp on the amount of work with the whipper snipper – a bit of extra effort at this stage can save a lot of drama further down the track. Many’s the time I’ve had to stop rendering, cut my way through the reinforcing mesh and trim the bales back to allow a reasonable thickness of render, always important, but critical on external surfaces to guarantee a waterproof finish. There’s probably not a lot more to say on the stacking of this job before I move on to the rendering when I return home next weekend, so you’ll hear from me then.
Hooroo, Mark
