A few years ago I decided I didn't want to have a huge mortgage hanging over my head, I didn't want to throw money away on rent, and I wanted to live in a home made of natural materials, sooooo... began the project to build myself a small straw bale home in a wild place in the mountains of South Spain, first few photos below show the finished house, scroll down to see the build/process, I had no idea how to do it, but I thought it out for many weeks, and then with many willing friends and lots of recycled wood and windows we started....
Then the wobbly bit before staking and tying the roof plate on (a circle of wooden poles on top of the uppermost layer of bales). The house is 5 bales high on front of terrace and 6 bales high at the back to allow for roof drainage, then the roofing with planks from old pallets that we took apart with crowbars and cut to size to nail onto the beams, I was building, organizing, reycling and cooking 3 times a day for my friends/volunteers who were staying in tents, great team, and many different volunteers helped over the 6 weeks it took. The biggest job was carrying the 100 straw-bales 2 km up the mountain! Then we covered the roof with a thin layer of recycled wooden sheets and some thick cardboard, then the tough 'green house' plastic they use on the coast here for indestructible greenhouses, then the shade material, both those two last layers stapled on around the rim of the house, finally a thick layer of straw for insulation.
(
) (
) (
)
Then we made a mud plaster(local earth is 30% clay so we just filtered it and mixed it with water) for the walls, one layer only! whacked on with the heel of the hand, smoothed over, later painted with a cal and colour pigment (5% linseed oil), Ok so this was no professional job! in the books it says 3 layers, but 6 years on the house is still standing strong and looking nice, I lived in it for 4 years before donating it for a teacher from our free school project to live in. it was very comfortable in winter and in high heat of summer. The floor was a 5cm layer of mus smotthed out, then when totally dry painted with three layers of linseed oil, hard as cement!
The 100 bales cost 250 Euro, the waterproof protective roof layers 150 and then nails and screws and hinges the rest, i had a fire bath (see above photo) and a small solar system which could charge a laptop and run my 100watt camper van washing machine, I piped water into the house direct from a nearby mountain Spring and had a gas cooker. An over sized cook pot sat permanently on top of the wood burner (an ex gas bottle conversion) to provide near constant hot water, life was not hard! except....for the climb up there with food shopping and heavy baby!. I grew some veg in the garden and there were lots of almond, olive and fig trees, the fruit trees we planted struggled in the summer because of less water to share, but my lemon and apricot trees are doing great. The house needs care, every year a few dents re filled with mud, every 2 years a new paint layer, its like a living being. I want to say a huge thank you to the many people who helped out and without their generous efforts it wouldn't have been possible. If this kind of house appeals to you - you can build one too, i am sure!
