Professional Strawbale has been fortunate enough to win the job to stack and render a house for Unicorn House, based in Daylesford. The house is in Glenhope, near Mia Mia, which is just out of Redesdale in Central Victoria. This is about an hour’s drive from home – quite a luxury! At this time of year, the countryside around Redesdale is extremely pretty, which makes me very grateful to be doing a job that lets me work in some of the most beautiful places in the state. (See picture)
As with all the strawbale homes I’ve worked on for Unicorn House, this frame is a ‘buck’ style frame, where instead of using a simple post to support the perimeter beam, a large upright box is built from 90×45mm pine and 5ply, the cavity of which is filled with polyester insulation. The buck style of frame is an American system, not used very commonly in Australia. Its main attraction from a builders point of view is the lateral bracing afforded by the width of the thing – it’s effectively a post that’s as wide as the bale wall itself. Another advantage of the buck system is that it provides a series of pretty predictable vertical fixing points right throughout the strawbale sections of the building. Not only are they predictable in their position in the wall, but should be under a uniform depth of render, making fixing after rendering fairly easy. Provided it’s been built pretty accurately, and is properly fixed to the slab (or sub-floor frame in the case of timber floors) it does brace the wall against any lateral movement. Another attraction of this system is that with a ‘buck’ on either side of every opening, there is no need to worry about trimming bales to form nice, neat corners at the doors and windows. As you can see from the photograph, the bales are stacked as infill in between the bucks that form the sides of the door, (on the left) and a curving window section (on the right).
From a strawbale subcontractors point of view, it makes the stacking of the bales extremely easy, but this is probably offset from the builders point of view by the extra work in actually making the bucks. A series of long fixing battens are required for mounting a kitchen cupboard unit which was overlooked in the stacking stage, so I’ll photograph and describe the process for the next blog entry. Hooroo! LOOKING FOR BALES? This week we’ve been contacted by a fellow in Mt Evelyn in the Yarra Ranges who runs a stock feed supply business, and has an oversupply of good quality straw and is looking to move it in a hurry. We haven’t seen the bales in question, but he says they are suitable for building- any interested parties should use their own judgment to decide if they are dry and clean enough to use. John Wright of Complete Hay Supplies can be contacted on 0427 001803 or jsw504@bigpond.net.au
