The windows and doors have been taped and the second coat of exterior plaster is on, which means there is no more visible straw. Our house looks NORMAL(ish)! This hasn't been without difficulties. On Sunday (my birthday), Peter and I were feeling victorious. We had spent the weekend installing the final bits of straw and had just ~2 hrs of plaster lath installation to go, which could be done Monday night. Plasterers were scheduled for Tuesday. On Monday, Peter met with our build team and they finalized window details. Basically - it means the team bought and installed fancy expensive tapes to ensure good air sealing between the windows and window bucks. Tuesday morning I went out to cover a couple of minor issues with the plasterers. Then I learned that the plaster would not adhere to the tapes. This meant more plaster lath would need to go over the tapes (they are self sealing, so puncturing them is not the end of the world, but still not great). The plaster crew though needed to get started, because I had 8 guys on site, whose time was money. Several frantic calls/texts to our general contractor site manager, plaster contractor, strawbale expert, and architect later, we settled on paying the plaster crew to install plaster lath over the tape. I then went to work 2 hrs late. Little did we expect, but the plaster crew went on to REMOVE at least $1000 worth of tape, and more in value of our general construction crew's work. We still don't entirely know why this happened. Tuesday evening and Wednesday we franticly tried to troubleshoot where the tapes were most necessary, order more, get them up , and ensure plaster lath was installed on top before the plaster crew started work on the interior on Friday. Today is Thursday, and we seemed to have gotten it done. Building a house is stressful. But at least the result looks pretty?
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The eaves on the top story had square window boxes framed up in preparation for the triple windows. Because of the unique shape of the middle window (rounded arch) the contractor crew decided to wait for the windows to arrive and create framing around them to ensure the measurements were exact. The left and right windows are shorter rectangles, which left boxes that needed to be framed up and filled like any other wall cavity. More exciting window work! The heaviest ones needed two 300lb capacity lifts. It was quite nerve racking seeing the 400lb 4 panel windows and 600lb french doors be lifted by the machine. It was all hands on deck with the windows. I put down my camera to help all turn the lift cranks. Our Zola windows arrived today! Why is this a big deal? Because they're from Germany. Why German windows? Well, we wanted windows with three characteristics:
This combination simply doesn't exist currently with US manufacturers. You can get tilt/turn, vinyl, triple pane or double hung, wood, triple pane or many other combinations but never all three. It certainly was a hassle getting them here. Zola didn't provide techs to move them from the truck. They insisted that our crew needed to move them and they needed to be unloaded with a skid steer. The way they were secured to the pallets made them unstable to unload with the skid steer, so some of the windows had to be moved by hand. By the end, our guys got them off the truck and in the back yard without damage. Hallelujah. Also oddly, our windows were the only items in the whole container. Not very efficient, but at this point there is nothing we can do about it. In any case, WE HAVE AWESOME WINDOWS ONSITE AND INTACT! Random pictures from plaster coat number 1. Our plaster crew is great. As I was trying to stay ahead of the plaster crew with my stuffing, I got to talking with one of the members. He is from Mexico like the rest of the group, and he used to be a cook. When the pandemic hit, he joined the plaster crew and loves it. He says he enjoys getting to work outside, and the crew is fun. Out of all of the construction crews we've had on site I have never heard one laugh as much as this group.
I needed some extra bales and stuffing, so I had to make a couple of trips to Bachmans and Home Depot.
Word to the wise - get your straw at Bachmans. The price is the same as Home Depot, but the bales are full size and are long straw. James came over while I was working. He and Peter ordered pizza, and they kept me company as I put up lath.
With a straw bale house, you want to keep the bales away from moisture and that includes water splatter from the ground as well as snow drifts. That's why the bottom portion of the first floor does not have bales. We have (inaccurately) called this section the pony wall.
Behind the stone, this area has rockwool insulation, and a number of layers of special papers and venting to insure property moisture management. We originally had wanted to put dense packed cellulose in these cavities, but it would have held on to too much moisture. The stone now looks lovely. The remaining pieces will get put in around the doors and windows as the latter are installed. Some snippets of the electrical and HVAC work. We tried to keep as much of the electrical out of the walls as possible. Where we couldn't, the electrical wires were fished directly through the bales. To do this, the electrician had to cut through the 2x2 inch mesh. Not ideal, because I then had to follow up to repair each of those sections (about 10 in all) with stapling, pins, and sometimes plaster lath. (This is the result of us trying to get the bales done before winter). In an ideal scenario, you should frame your walls, install the bales, install the electrical, and then mesh the bales.
Birds stole pieces of our house and made houses of their own in multiple exterior walls as we continued to finish sewing, plaster lath, and stuffing. One bird unfortunately got stuck in the lath somehow and perished.
Over the spring/summer Matt, Khaki, and Tara (and her little one!) came out to help.
We're making progress with having finished all of the second floor meshing and further sewed the second floor. We need to keep the tarps up until the plaster coat is on, and so as much as possible we try to keep them up while we're working. Doing so even allowed us to work while it was raining!
Now that the snow is gone (mostly) and the sun is shining, it's finally warm enough to get back to work! In the month of April, we're now working on installing mesh to the interior gables, papering window boxes, and installing plaster lath to wooden surfaces (beams wider than 4" and window boxes). All of this work is necessary to prep the surfaces for plastering.
Regarding plastering, we've decided that - in order to get this project done this year and for the sake of our marriage - we will be hiring a professional plaster crew to plaster the house. 3 layers on a building this large is simply too much for us, especially as we both have full time jobs. Since January, we've:
When the weather turned cold, the work moved slower and took a pause. Plastering can't happen below 32F anyway, so we made the decision to pause until the spring on the walls. A2 made progress on the porch and balcony, and the roofers installed the ice and water membrane. We're tentatively planning to finish meshing and sewing on the weekends starting in mid-March when temps should be milder. We'll make an announcement about volunteer opportunities closer to March. Successes:
One of the beauties of a community build is truly involving all sorts of people of differing ages, races, nationalities, professions. We've welcomed:
Below are some pics/videos of some of the sillier sides of the build. I mean - if you're going to have mounds of straw, you might as well play in them :) A side effect of moving around, cutting, retying, and generally being around straw is that we end up with a lot of loose straw everywhere. Seriously. Check out the photos and video below of Katie jumping into a pile of loose straw that is just from a couple days of work on only the second floor - that's a lot of loose straw! So what happens to all of that loose straw?
Since the very first day of the project, we have had big tarps full of loose straw in front of our property with a sandwich board reading "Free Straw" on it. There seemed to be some skepticism at first, but slowly we have had neighbors come take truckloads for their garden beds. Luckily, we are at the right time of the year for people to be winterizing their gardens. Of particular interest, a group showed up to grab some straw to use as insulation for cat houses that they were making for feral cats. We also reached out to a sustainable agriculture listserv that we were on from our compost days and have made some good connections. We had a farmer come to pick up three big bags of loose straw for his strawberry fields and another pick some up for the pig stalls. The University of Minnesota Equine Center and animal barns have shown quite a bit of interest in our leftover full bales at the end of the project. Our favorite connection so far, though, has been with KaZoua Berry and her husband Michael, who own Lifestyle Wok LLC as part of the organic farming incubator at Big River Farms. Big River Farms (formerly the Minnesota Food Association) provides land, education, and market aggregation for emerging farmers on 1/8 to 6 acre fields located in Marine on St. Croix. Big River Farms particularly focuses on immigrants, refugees, people of color, and other group who have historically either been disenfranchised or underrepresented in agriculture. KaZoua and Michael have .6 acres of land through this program, which they use to grow peanuts and garlic (so far). They are focused on regenerative agriculture and are currently cover cropping .4 of their acres to help it build organic matter. This fall, they have planted 30 pounds of organic garlic in mounds and covered it in several bags of our leftover straw! This was a hard year for farmers due to the drought conditions experienced here in Minnesota (and in large swaths of the country overall). There were hay and straw shortages as crops struggled to get enough water to grow. When KaZoua and Michael planted this spring, they didn't have immediate access to irrigation and ended up spending quite a bit of money on straw to keep their soil cool and retain moisture. As part of their regenerative practices, they were determined to avoid plastic mulch, even if straw cost more in the short term. I'm happy that our leftover straw can find another new life to help out the community, particularly a community that is so dedicated to reducing waste, treating the planet well, and creating better accessibility for everyone! KaZoua and Michael are still working on a website for their farm, but be on the lookout in the future. They are a great group to support! We're nearly done with the bales! Just the west gable is remaining. This week, we'll finish that with the construction crew since they also need to put up some more metal bracing. We'll also schedule a couple of evening volunteer opportunities for meshing and sewing so that we're prepped for plastering this weekend.
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This week the main construction crew helped finish baling the south and east walls. The gable end was particularly tough, with more metal work needing done, per the engineer specs. Working high up on scaffolds is slow going, but we made real progress. Issues we encountered this week:
Overall, we have just a bit more meshing on the east gable and then the construction crew will move to the west the week of Oct. 25th. We anticipate getting all of the baling and meshing done on the house by the end of the week. Given the election on Nov. 2nd, we'll likely be unable to coordinate volunteers until after that. We've been monitoring the long-term forecast, and there is a glimmer of hope that the temps will be above freezing the weekend of Nov. 6. If that holds, we'll coordinate a crew for plastering. Everyone on our volunteer list can anticipate an email from us ~Nov. 3 whether or not that is going forward. We got the first floor effectively baled and meshed and we moved on to the second floor. The north wall was quite a challenge, especially in putting in the top row of bales and compressing them down. We had to be creative a use car jacks to do so. With the north wall baled (minus the corners...we need scaffolding on the east and west for that), we've moved to the south wall to get the bales in before the roofers come back and put on the sleepers (think long eaves). Putting in the top row without roof sleepers is much easier. We worked our way around the house from the south to the east, north, then west. Each time we baled, tamped, weed wacked, meshed, and sewed. On the west wall, an awesome team of women finished the weed wacking, meshing, and sewing and got a fun team pic. |
AuthorKatie Jones and Peter Schmitt chronicle their building adventure. Archives
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