Building with Straw Comprehensive
Building with Straw Comprehensive Workshop
This is a 6-day comprehensive course, teaching hands-on and in-detail our process of building a load-bearing strawbale home. In this workshop we will construct both our small strawbale demonstration structure and a “real-life” larger strawbale building for a local friend, which is permitted to Santa Cruz, Arizona, county standards. It will be led be Arjuna “Oso” Steen and Maggie Kloote, with support from Bill and Athena Steen.
Over the years we have evolved a unique hybrid system that combines “load-bearing” or compressed bale walls with other structural supports such as window and door bucks, and external pins to stop and control the compression. It is an effective, practical, and flexible system. With a few simple modifications it can also be used to work with in-fill system can also be simply modified to work with “in-fill” walls. It has also been honed-in to work well with clay plasters.
This course is intended for beginners with plans on building a strawbale house and want to learn each element of the process from foundations to roof. It is also well-suited for builders/contractors who want a full deep dive into our process,, or owner-builders that may be supervising the construction of their strawbale home and want to be more informed of the design and build process.
What makes this course unique is that it teaches beginners not only strawbale wall building but also the essentials of construction and building details. For example, foundations, roofing and electrical. We will also teach you hands-on how to cover your bales with an earthen base-coat.
Participants are welcome to bring their floor plans for group design discussions and comments.
The course will cover the following:
- Stacking Bale walls
- Creating partial bales
- Tying corner bales and exterior pins
- Compressing bales with threaded rods and top plate
- Foundation and roof details specific to bale walls
- Top plate and truss constructions
- Foundation details and alternatives
- Structural window/door bucks and pins
- Electrical and plumbing details only specific to bales
- Roof assembly with truss and rafter details
- Plastering bales with clay basecoat
We encourage small, handcrafted and artistic buildings that are uniquely personal in character and at the same time, energy efficient and matched to local climatic conditions primarily through passive conditioning.
For examples see our many strawbale buildings at Canelo.
- Dates: This course begins with orientation and dinner Wednesday evening 6:30pm, April 8, and ends Tuesday, April 14, at 5pm. Dinner that evening and breakfast the following morning will be provided.
- Meals: All meals are included in the workshop price.
- Accommodations: Camping is included in the workshop price. We have a private rooms available for $40 p/night and a bunkroom available for $10 p/night.
- Deposit: A $400 deposit is required to register for this workshop.
Read more on our General Workshop Info.
Workshop Syllabus
- Arrival night before – with dinner and introductions from 7pm
- Bale Basics: Where to locate bales, How to modify bales, How to Measure bales.
- Discussion of various Bale Building Systems, from Load-Bearing to In-fill and Hybrid.
- Compression Test: Figure out how much bales will compress to get measurements for Window and Door bucks as well as for bamboo pinning.
- Deconstruct our Demo Strawbale Building
- Raise demo building – how to stack Bale walls and learn corner tying knot.
- Mount Window and Door Bucks.
- Cut Bamboo pins and tie them onto surface of bale walls.
- Discuss and build top plate
Offsite All Day
- Raising Will’s Strawbale building
Offsite All Day
- Compression & top plates at wills
- Window Details
- Clay Basics: How to Identify clay, Where to find clay, How to Mix a highly flexible base / sculpting plaster coat that can go on as thick as needed over bales.
- Plaster bales with clay base coat.
Offsite All Day
- Electrical details
- Roofing & trusses.
