Mansfield Update – May 11th

Happy Mothers Day to all the Mums out there.

This week we’re a couple of days or so behind schedule because of a few mechanical hassles with the render pump, but hope to make up the lost time over the next few weeks. The first coat of render is on and the house is basically waterproof, which means we can sleep soundly at night, even if its pissing rain, which it should be doing in the North-East at this time of year.

Except for a few nervous hours when the straw was still exposed, we’ve been extraordinarily lucky with the weather, even having some days in the very high teens or low twenties during this last week. All of this great weather is a huge advantage to us as drying time is critical at this time of the year. no matter where you are in Victoria.

Whereas the builder on our previous job had only allowed us a total of 35mm for the render, making it pretty tricky to ensure an adequate thickness of covering, the builder on this current job has allowed us a full 50mm, which over the whole of the job of nearly 300 square metres, means an extra 11/2 cubic metres of render (that’s a lot of mud!). The ideal thickness on a strawbale job is 45mm, as a 50mm render thickness not only means an extra metre and a half of mud, but this has to mostly be applied in the second coat. There’s only a limited amount of mud that raw straw will hold on the first coat, and if the top coat is too thick it will be prone to excessive cracking, therefore, the second coat is the only place to apply the extra 5mm of render. If the weather does turn particularly wet and cold, we may be struggling to get enough dry second-coat to start the top coat on. The building is situated on a gentle, North facing slope, with good air flow and plenty of sun, meaning it should dry out pretty easily.

Well until next week,

Don’t hesitate to email us with any questions or queries and we will answer as soon as possible,

Hooroo, Mark 

Mansfield Update May 5th

Welcome to the blog for this week.

I thought I’d briefly mention the electrical work on this house as Fiona and Stephen run an industrial and commercial electrical business, they’ve come up with some great ideas in the electrical department for their new home. As can be seen from this weeks photo, short sections of 90mm PVC pipe have been placed inside the straw and frame construction that forms the window heads. These are happily just the right size to fit a little low wattage light fitting into, (the kind that normally fit “flush” into the plaster ceiling) and will provide a lovely highlight to the curves of the openings.

Stephen has screwed the top of the pipe to a timber noggin between the trusses so that the bottom of the pipe is exactly level (and square) with the render of the window head, providing a neat looking finish. These should look fantastic, and we’ll post photos on the website as soon as we can!

Another interesting innovation is a switch placed in the kitchen so that the power circuit running televisions, computers, sound systems etc can be switched off all in one go, thereby saving about 10% of the running costs of all the appliances. Great idea hey? Saves running around every night to turn everything off.

Stephen and Fiona are dedicated to the cause of saving this world for their kids, and are definitely leading the way in lots of areas. Good on ‘em!

The first coat of render has been pumped on, and the second coat is underway. By the end of this week, weather permitting, we’ll be starting the top coat, and we’re on the homeward stretch.

Talk to you then.

 

 

Mansfield Update

Welcome to the update of the Mansfield job.

Regular readers will forgive me, I hope, for not writing the blog last week, but we have had two pretty sick little ones and a lot of travelling to do. Many thanks are due at this point to my endlessly hard-working wife Cathy, without whom this whole venture would be made much harder. The stacking on our current job in Mansfield is complete, and the rendering started on Wednesday.

 

 

 As you can see from the photograph we’ve added, the chippy’s have all the timber work in the walls ready for fixing to for the cabinet-makers. The photo shows the kitchen/dining area – the top of the horizontal length of pine is set at 900mm from the floor, which gives a point to screw to through the back of the cabinets near the top, and the bottom render stop, where normally the skirting boards would fix to, gives a fixing point  for the bottom of the cabinet. This 45mm timber has been placed flat against the surface of the straw, meaning that the front surface of the timber will be exposed for the cabinet-maker to see clearly, but will be hidden once the cabinet carcasses are in place.

To the right of the kitchen window, you can see an upside down ‘T’ of timber, which has been put in place to fix the rangehood and its flue to. Because we don’t know the exact dimensions of the rangehood, we decided to cut a groove into the surface of the straw for the timber to sit inside, and so hide the timber beneath the full 45mm thickness of the render. Steven, the owner, has taken video footage and measurements of all the timber in the walls so that he can refer to it later to find the exact locations for fixing to (especially the pine noggins put in at 2.1 metres for picture hanging which are all through the living areas and bedrooms). These will all have sheets of aviary-mesh wire stapled over them to anchor them firmly into the render, but any that will carry a significant amount of weight have fencing wire looped around them, through the walls and around an offcut of trench mesh. This is then tightened with gripples, which pulls the whole arrangement tight to the straw wall.

As you can probably gather a lot of thought and effort is put into providing adequate fixing points for all the trades who follow us in the building process. It’s kind of inevitable that something will have been forgotten, so we’ll describe fixing to the wall through finished render at a later date.

Until next week,

Hooroo, Mark.

Hi Everyone

Hi to all of you who read Mark’s blog. Just a quick apology on Mark’s behalf that he has not updated the blog over the last two weeks, things have been really hectic and we have had two pretty sick children, but he will be back on deck by the end of this coming weekend.

We hope you have a relaxing, safe long weekend.

Regards, Cathy and Mark

Week One – The New Project

Well folks, the Easter break is over, I’ve run out of chocolate, and we’re back in Mansfield. The Autumn break seems to be here, as there was a dusting of snow on Mt Buller last week, and a brief shower or three with a cool and windy change on Wednesday afternoon. We don’t have a roof on our current project as of Wednesday, so we were a might bit nervous as the change came through. According to the locals, we only got 4mm in total, which was just enough to justify the couple of hours we spent putting black plastic up where the galvanised steel roofing should have been. By Thursday morning, the showers had cleared, and all was well.

Mat Kirley’s gang of chippies have done a fabulous job of the frame, which is probably as simple as a strawbale frame can be, with little or no unnecessary timber to obstruct the stacking process.

As can be seen from the photographs we’ve uploaded, all of the loadbearing uprights are of envelope treated 90×45mm plantation pine; You may care to note that the uprights on either side of the window and door openings are two lengths of 90×45 pine nailed together, placed with their widest side parallel to the wall. Positioning them like this not only gives them maximum strength to resist the the considerable pressure generated by compressing the bales with wire and gripples, but makes fixing them to the 250×45 perimeter beam quite simple. (Unlike the previous job at Barwite, the windows won’t be fitted until after the render is finished, saving a considerable amount of time in masking and cleaning).

As we are stacking the straw walls, the carpenters are finishing off the frame, putting fascia on for the roofing plumber to work to, and fixing render stops inside and out. As can be seen from the second photo below a straight edge and reliable level are used to plumb up from the render stop at the bottom to find the correct position at the top. The bottom render stop not only gives us a nice, straight line to work to, but provides a fixing point for the skirting board. The top render stop provides a straight line for the render to meet, and guarantees that the plaster cornice has a flat surface to fit to, giving a bug, dust and draft proof finish between the lime-rendered walls and the plaster ceiling.

Mat Kirley does seem to have a tendency to over-engineer things a little (never a bad thing), and as you can see from the last photograph, a little noggin has been placed onto the edge of the window frame to prevent distortion under compression, but, in actual fact will prevent the bales compressing properly, as it fouls the end of the bale, and stops it sliding smoothly down the frame. This will be circumvented by levering the ends of the bales past these obstacles as the compression takes place.

These window frames on the inside of the wall are designed and built solely to carry the weight of the straw and render above them, and must be carefully thought out to allow them to accomodate the desired curve or corner at the windows edge.

Stay tuned for the next exciting chapter, in which we’ll talk about some more specific stacking issues. Hooroo, Mark

Week Five

The rendering is finished at our Barwite job, and the internal fit-out is almost done. The kitchen and bathroom cabinets are done, all the architraves and skirting boards are finished, as well as the plumbing and electrical fit-off.

The owner is very proud of this house, and justifiably so – she’s gone along the path of eco-friendly sustainability as much as she could with a high-tech solar hot water service, hydronic (hot water) heating in the slab run from a solid – fuel stove in the kitchen, and, of course strawbale external walls.

It really is a lovely little house over-looking the Broken River, it has a great ‘feel’ to it, and will serve the owner and her family well for years to come. Congratulations Nicky, you’ve done a fantastic job.

And so to our next project, which is just 10 km or so away on the other side of Mansfield, in Ogilvies road, and we’ll be starting that one immediately after the Easter break.

This is another very exciting job as Stephen  and Fiona have been planning this for quite a while, and have gone to an enormous effort to make sure it fulfils all their ‘green’ requirements.

Local gossip has it that the builder Matt Kirley is ‘pumped’ about this house, and judging by the speed that the frame has gone up, I’d say he is!!

The owners are jumping out of their skin with excitement too, and who can blame them? With half an ounce of luck, we’ll be able to up-load some photographs to the blog when we start, and you’ll hear from us then,

Bye for now,

Mark

Week Four

It’s summer again!! The days have been up around the low 30’s, but the mornings are cool and clear.

The rendering on our project is finished internally and the fit-out is proceeding perfectly – all the face-plates for the electrical switches and plugs fit flat and neat on the render, and the skirting boards look great.

Speaking of electrical, Stephen Bolitho is the electrician on the Barwite job, and he’s also our next client. Stephen and Fiona’s slab has just been poured, and a gang of chippies are starting the frame this coming week – exciting stuff! Matt Kirley, the builder on the Stephen and Fiona’s job, says the frame should be up and the roof on by the end of the month, weather permitting. Even though it’s a 30 square house, it’s amazing what can be achieved by a gang of switched-on chippies and a few weeks of good weather.

While we are on the subject of good tradies, Stephen Bolitho and Matt Kirley are going to among the first people on our list of strawbale friendly tradespeople – provided it can be done fairly easily, we’re planning to list the names, contact details and web links (if any) of all the tradies we meet on each job who are enthusiastic, honest, hardworking and ‘green’ technology friendly. This will be a list that we can email to anyone who requests it. Eventually this will build up into a pretty comprehensive list of people, covering all the trades required for domestic and commercial building all over the state of Victoria, and further afield if possible!!

Anyway, back to Barwite – the render on the outside is going full steam-ahead this week, starting on the tallest wall (about 4 1/2 metres x 3 metres) facing north, and heading clockwise (from above) to the west-facing wall. We’ve got a fair gang of volunteer labour this week, and so we’re hoping to have the external render pretty close to finished by the end of this coming week.

As usual, I’m seriously pressed for time this weekend and so will have to leave it there.

Hooroo, Mark.

Week 3

Summer is over, and Autumn’s beginning, which is a beautiful time of year in the high country. We had just a dusting of snow on top of Mount Buller (3kms or so from Mansfield), and a distinct chill in the air in Barwite.

As I mentioned last week, the rendering is in full swing, with the top coat almost finished internally. The plaster sheeters have been and gone, and the plumbing and electrical fit-offs start next week.

So far we’ve had a few prospective clients come and look through the house, and they’ve all been quite impressed with the neatness of the finish. The render meets the plaster-board on the internal walls very neatly, the curves around the windows are fairly tight and uniform, and the skirting boards sit tightly against the bottom 100mm or so of render, meaning a minimum of gapfilling before painting.

As the builder hasn’t provided a timber render-stop at the tops of the walls, it remains to be seen how the ceilings will meet the render, but I’m fairly confident we’ve done a good enough job to ensure a decent finish.

The ceilings are corrugated iron in-fill between exposed oregon rafters, and the builder reckons plaster cornice will be used to finish off between the render and the corrugated iron. I’m not entirely sure how this will look, but at the very least, should make up for any unevenness in the tops of the walls.

I’m running late this week juggling working away, family and life commitments so I will be off until next week,

Hooroo

Week Two

Welcome to Professional Strawbale’s blog for the second week of February. A small correction from last week’s page – the rye straw was grown for seed harvesting, not feed harvesting – any straw used for building purposes must have minimal feed value.

The project at Barwite, about 10km north of Mansfield is progressing well, and the owner, (who is also the builder), can see the light at the end of the tunnel, so the pressure is on!! The internal walls have been plastered, and the electrical and plumbing fit-off starts next week. This means that any sections of strawbale wall that have plumbing or electrical work in them will need to have  the top coat of render complete by Wednesday or Thursday. However - I would like to back-track to the stacking stage of this particular house to illustrate a very important point.

If you look closely to the photograph we’ve posted, you’ll notice there is a post in the wall corresponding to every one of the oregon beams that support the roof. These posts are 90mm X 90mm, and are spaced at 900 mm centres – meaning that there’s almost exactly 855mm in between each post. The upshot of this is that virtually every bale in the wall shown had to have a 90mm X 90mm notch cut in the side of it, so the outside face of the straw and the outside of the posts were ‘flush’.

The owner was keen to have the entire wall surface covered in chicken wire reinforcing, so the posts gave us plenty of places to staple to, but I think that’s where the advantages end!!

 Not only does notching the bales around the posts consume a fair bit of time and energy, but it makes the cut bale want to bow around the cut to form a banana shape. Bales like this not only have to be handled pretty carefully to avoid their tendency to ‘pop’ and fall apart, but take a considerable amount of bashing into shape once the walls are compressed.

 If all of the 300 x  50 mm oregon was sitting on a perimeter beam of some sort, say 250 or 300 by 50 mm hardwood, the posts could have been spaced as much as 3 metres apart, radically reducing the amount of chainsaw work, and meaning each bale stayed as a whole, integrated unit.

I reckon that’s about it for the stacking on this one; so next week we’ll discuss the rendering process. Hoo-roo,

                                Mark

The current project

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