Building a Natural Home

This weekend I put up a few more posts of the interior walls. I wish I could have done more, but there are a few decisions/researches that are pending.

Designing a building is a monster job. I don’t envy those who do it all the time — I hope they like doing it! Being amateurs that we are (though we are on our second cottage) there are lots of decisions that get made in-process, and our plans change. You can never have a perfect house, so the ability to look at variables and pros/cons and making a reasonable, rational decision is a key. I hear that house renovations are potent marriage killers. Well, my wife and I are not anywhere near that danger right now, but I can see how building a house together CAN kill a marriage.

Next 2 weeks we will put the house on hold and attend other matters. After that, major projects coming up — roof, ceiling, electric. I can’t wait to get these decisions out of the way and start working on those big things. Because that’s when progress is much more obvious — it’s hard to feel productive about a few posts and hours of discussions (though it’s all very important and necessary).

This weekend we got started on the inner walls. The new strawbale cottage will house our bedroom, bath and toilet (in two separate chambers) and some storage space. I got some 2×4x10s to use as posts.

The trick is the reasonable amount of precision required to put up these posts. It’s kinda hard to measure the precise location and put them up perfectly straight by myself. Getting my wife to help me is out of question, though, as the house is swarming with bees. (I mentioned that before, didn’t I?) Got stung again this morning.

In any case, every time we move on to a different project, it seems that we have to spend quite a lot of time figuring out how to go about it. This was no exception. At first we spent some time discussing how the house’s actual dimension came out smaller than what we designed. So we had to remove some walls from inside as well. Then I sat and thought about how I was going to do this by myself. I posted 1 post all of Saturday. Took Sunday off for Father’s Day, and put up another post in 1 hour Monday morning. Once I get going, the rest usually is just about plugging away. Figuring out the how is half the battle.

I wish I had a digital camera so I can post pics.

I finished plastering the tops of the walls. I woke up early to work on it a couple of days last week, although in Texas even on longest days the sun doesn’t come up until after 6am, which doesn’t leave me much time to work on it.

Compared to self-engineering involved in designing and executing strawbale and cob walls, running electrical wires is a piece of cake. There are products made to let you do it easily, and tons of info/books/resources. Sometimes, though we have wondered why there are still such few varieties of electrical boxes. And they are not very well-labeld for beginners. It’s a good thing we live 3 miles away from a Home Depot. During wirings we make trips there often, to see if they have parts we didn’t know we needed but we realized we do as we are doing it.

We will be ordering a roof soon, too. We’re going to do another metal roof. That’s going to be easy, too, as the roof on the strawbale is pitched so shallow. I can easily walk on it. The cob house had 12/12 pitch — 45 degrees! That was scary, but I am proud to say our roof doesn’t leak. Woo hoo!

It’s June in Texas, and it’s… hot.

This weekend I finished stuffing loose straw in the gap between the top of the strawbale walls and the ceiling framing. I hold them together by stapling a piece of burlap. Then on Sunday I started plastering the top of the bale walls. Before we can install ceilings, we need to completely enclose the tops of the walls in plaster, so that the straw within are protected from fire and moisture.

Plaster sounds like something fancy (at least to me) but it’s mostly clay. Mix in a bit of sand and shortly cut straw, and we added a bit of Borax for extra protection from fire and bugs. This (without Borax) is the same ingredient as cob/adobe. Just different ratio and more water. The same stuff works for different purposes, I guess.

The bees are still all over the place, new nests popping up everywhere. I’m going to be working around them all summer long. I wish if I could have a friendlier co-existence, but that may be too much to ask.