Strawbale House

Andrew, our architect, finished the preliminary drawings a few days ago and as part of that has performed a preliminary energy assessment. The outcome was better than both Rosalba and I expected.

In Andrew’s own words: “It doesn’t get much better than 10 stars!”

To clarify, in Australia, houses are rated according their nergy needs for cooling and heating on a scale from 1 to 10. 1 being “bloody atrocious” and 10 being “as good as it gets”.

Also to put the preliminary energy rating of 10 into perspective, most brick veneer homes currently built in Australia achieve a rating of somewhere between 4.5 to 5.

So, as you might imagine we are quite chuffed about this extraordinary good result, even being preliminary only.

The next thing we are doing now is to speak to an accredited installer of solar panels (photovoltaic) to perform an assessment of our energy needs. Shane from Alternative Energy Solutions is going to meet with us soon to help us with that.

I’ll keep you posted on the outcome of that assessment.

Andrew, our architect, has sent us some 3D pictures of our future home today which I’d like to share with you.

The next step is to work out the size of the photo voltaic system for our electricity needs. That’s going to be exciting, especially when we get a better idea of how much the solar panels and batteries are going to cost us.

On Wednesday we met our Architect, Andrew, again to discuss the fist draft version of the floor plan for our new home. I have included a scanned copy of the draft that was drawn by Steve (the Building Designer working together with Andrew) below for your enjoyment. (Click on the plan for a larger version of it.)

As is usually the case, Rosalba and I have identified some areas where we would like to see some change. I’d also like to see any changes we requested as (hopefully) valuable feedback for Andrew and Steve.

First of all we’d like to change the bathroom and toilet to be an ensuite instead of separate. The toilet should still have it’s own door to allow for proper reflection even when another person is using the bathroom. Having the bathroom and toilet become an ensuite starts making sense once I tell you that what is marked on this plan as “Bedroom 2″ is actually going to be my office.

We don’t intend to have many visitors staying overnight in our new home but instead we are also planning to build a separate little granny flat or guest house at a later date to make overnight visitors more comfortable.

We have also asked for a second toilet to be included on the plan next to the back door. The main reason for this being that we’d like to be able to get to a toilet without tramping through the whole house, if we are working outside.

We are quite happy for the laundry to become significantly smaller to free up some space for the second toilet, as both Rosalba and I can’t see that we are going to spend a lot of time in the Laundry. In our current house we have an undercover outdoor laundry that works quite well for us.

The outside walls are designed to be made of strawbales. Looking at the plan the walls look not quite as thick as I would have expected because Andrew and Steve designed them be built with the strawbales stacked on-end instead of laying flat as I expected.

The advantage of building the walls with strawbales on-end is that this makes the walls stronger according to Andrew. The disadvantages are that it makes it harder for the render to stick to the strawbales and that building some alcoves into the walls is quite a bit harder as well.
Rosalba and I feel that we’d rather make the render stick better as the walls should still be quite sturdy with the strawbales stacked flat.

Rosalba has also asked for more bench space in the kitchen and the inclusion of space for a wall oven instead of an oven underneath the stove.

All in all, Rosalba and I are quite happy with this first draft of the floor plan. It is very close to what we imagined without any big or nasty surprises.

Also according to Steve with the plan as presented our new home would have a 9½ star rating. This compares to a standard brick veneer home having about a star rating of 4½ stars. Both Steve and Andrew believe that we would not need to heat or cool our home at all and the fireplace would be used more for aesthetics than heating.

So what do you think?

While reading through some magazines to work out how we best could get what we wanted out of our future home we came across this ad for a book of home designs. Wanting to build with straw bales we were intrigued by that book as the ad mentioned all sorts of building types including straw bale houses.

The book is published by an architect named Peter Lees and very reasonably priced at only $29. Now this book does not contain finished plans but enough information to help you work out what you’d like or not in your house.

I bought this book thinking that it would give us a head start in the planning phase. This was not the case in the end as Peter Lees has some strong views in favour of loft houses and both Rosalba and I have strong views against multiple levels in our future home.

To be fair though, if you are open to multi level living than this book is certainly worth the small cost and it does feature some nice home designs. If you are interested you can find more information on Peter Lees website at www.cheaphomedesigns.com.

Rosalba and I have met with Andrew form W D Architects yesterday afternoon.

Andrew was great and listened to all our dreams and wishes for our house and gave some great feedback on some of our ideas. For example we though we’d build the house using a steel frame but Andrew reckons that it will be cheaper more sustainable to build with timber, if possible with recycled timber even.

Rosalba would like a large walk in pantry in our new house, so we don’t have to go shopping every couple of days and Andrew came up with a really neat idea of keeping the pantry cooler than the rest of the house. Basically you bury a ventilation pipe underground that comes out in the pantry and the pantry having some ventilation in the roof, which will draw cool air through the pipe buried in the ground into the pantry and the air that has warmed up is vented out of the roof. This, coupled with the insulation provided by the strawbale walls, should keep the pantry at a nice cool temperature all the time.

Andrew reckon’s our budget is a bit tight but we should still be able to pull it of, especially if we provide some labour ourselves and save where we can.

As a bit of trivia: Andrew has designed the Australian Wildlife Hospital (as reported on Treehugger) which uses strawbale walls as well and is currently being finished.

We are meeting the architect for the first time today, so both my wife and I are really excited.

As a treat for everyone, I have included a bigger picture of the view from our house site:

If you click on the image you can see a bigger version of it.