Soon after I became a contractor and created my website, I began hearing from people all over Oregon, Washington, and Northern California, wanting help building their straw bale homes.
There are just so many hours in a workweek, and driving more than an hour to a job site from my home in S. Oregon isn’t an option for me. My wife and I live on a rural wooded hillside where we tend a large garden and orchard, and actively manage a landscape to lower wildfire severity and encourage native species. Seasonal chores and community activities demand a lot of our attention, making it difficult for me to be gone more than an occasional few days.
What I could do from afar was coach designers, contractors and owner-builders on how to negotiate some of the unique steps in designing or building a straw bale house.
That’s how I began consulting on straw bale home builds. Most often, people reach out to me for advice on a particular plan they are considering. If they already bought the plans, they send me a set to review.
The plans are usually purchased from one of several on-line sources. These plans are often sold as “permit ready,” but that expression seems to carry different meanings.
The safest conclusion you can draw about “permit ready” plans is that the building described in the plans was probably permitted at least once before somewhere in North America. They may not be ready for you to submit for a permit.
Here are some questions I can help answer:
· Are they suited to your location? There are several considerations here. For example, if the original design was for a passive solar home in S. Arizona, and you’re building in Montana, you’ll need to make some adjustments to the amount of glazing and roof overhangs for the house to perform well in your location. Similarly, if you plan to build in an area with lots of wind-driven rain, a building designed for an area with little rainfall—wind-driven or-not—may not be suitable.
· Sometimes the plans you purchase are “legacy” plans; a house designed to the then-current standards of twenty or thirty years ago before current building codes and best practices pertaining to straw bale construction came along. Sometimes the plans employ a shear wall system no longer in common use. These plans may have several archaic features and specifications.
· If you are an owner-builder, plans generally don’t take into account your skill and experience level. There are several ways to build straw bale walls, some more difficult than others. Even experienced contactors appreciate knowing about faster and less costly ways to build when working with unfamiliar wall systems.
And of course, most people want to make at least some changes to the building plans—like moving a door or making a window larger, flipping a pantry with a bathroom, or raising some ceilings taller, or making a room smaller. Perhaps they want flared window reveals instead of rounded ones. How might those changes impact the building’s design, from a build-ability point of view?
These are the kinds of challenges people buying on-line plans ask me to review.
As a contractor I look at designs from a builder’s perspective; how would I do this so it performs as designed and doesn’t fail? What design modifications might make the construction process smoother, the building perform better, and the structure last longer?
If you want me to take a look at your plans before you apply for a permit, preferably early in the design process, let me know. I charge a fee for this; but the investment is worth it. Owners and builders have recouped my review fees many times over in lower labor costs, smarter material choices, faster builds, and better performing buildings.
We’ll start the conversation about building with straw bales at a higher level if you first read Straw Bale Building Details: An Illustrated Guide for Design and Construction, by the California Straw Building Association. Full disclosure: I had a hand in writing the book, along with sixty other volunteer contributors—all royalties earned from book sales support CASBA’s mission of promoting the use of straw as a building material. The book will answer a lot of questions about the design and building process, and perhaps raise others you weren’t expecting.