Strawbale House

Rosalba and I have purchased some Cantilever shelving to store some of the recycled material we are using to build our house. This shelving has arrived as a giant “Meccano Set” which Rosalba and I started assembling on Sunday.

We bought two sets and in this picture you can see the second set how it was delivered before we have assembled it and installed it. Most parts can easily be handled by a single person except for the uprights which you can see at the bottom of the pack. The uprights are really heavy and are still quite heavy even when carrying with two people. The only tools we needed where a couple of spanners and a tin snip to cut the bands holding the packs together.

In this next picture we have already assembled one set of this “Meccano Set”. Assembling and setting this up took a bit more than 2 hours to do and was actually quite intensive. Setting this up was also made slightly more difficult by the fact that it was raining when we did it and all the parts where wet and a bit slippery. The shelving was easy to set-up, but you definitely want to be at least two people as carrying some of the bits by yourself is backbreaking.

This last picture shows how we have been able to already clear up the shed a bit and how much cleaner it looks than just having it all stacked on the floor.

Unfortunately we ran out of time and out of nuts to assemble the second set. So we have another set to assemble and set-up. We’ll most likely do that in about a fortnight which should also give the supplier of the shelving enough time send the missing nuts to us.

All in all, the shelving was not cheap, but it will defenitley out last us and every single arm on this shelving is rated to cary up to 500 kg, which will mean we can store almost anything on this shelving. The arms alre also adjustable which is great as well and we are really happy with it.

John,  one of our friends, has given us some free door handles for our new home.  John is a locksmith and has told us that these handles would have most likely been thrown out.

These handles have come of some doors where the builders installed the wrong type of handles on the internal doors on a large new building. The business where John works was employed to remove this handles from the doors and install the correct handles.

Believe it or not, as this handles already had been installed once, they couldn’t be sold as new and were just sitting in a corner in a box taking up space and were about to be thrown out, when John offered us these.

Of course we were only to happy to receive all the handles for our doors for free and we certainly don’t mind that they have been installed once before. In fact they do look brand new and have hardly been used ever.

Later on we also found some handles for our front doors on eBay. They were very reasonably priced at $68 inclusive postage, so we are quite happy about those as well.

So now we already have all internal doors, the main entrance doors, all the door handles we need and some of the windows.

On the planning side of things we are now waiting on some engineers drawings before we can submit the plans to the local council for building approval. It’s quite exciting and Rosalba can’t wait to actually start doing stuff on building our new home.

Rosalba and I have started looking around for bits and pieces for our new home.  We have purchased the main entrance doors a while ago.

This week we were lucky enough to win an eBay auction for some nice french doors as shown below. We are planning to use these french doors as the doors to the little area outside our bedroom.

A couple of weeks back we have also won an auction for 12 louvre doors which we’ll be using for all the inside doors.

The following picture is of a couple of wooden inlay panels that we have managed to get at a very good price. We are not yet sure where we will be using these but when we saw them, we just had to have them.

We have visited our land (or as we tend to call it the farm) last weekend again. I am normally not very lucky when taking images of animals but this time I have been able to get a really nice shot of two female fairy wrens sitting on some branches.

These fariy wrens actually look bigger in this picture than they really are. Both of these together are about the size of a fist. They are light enough to sit on a seed stalk of gras without bending it much.

Rosalba and I went to the Sunday market in Chandler today to get organic fruit and veg as we do most weeks.

While strolling around looking for some laundry baskets we walked past this stall with beautifully carved solid wooden doors. There were some stricking designs on display, many of them with some African animals carved into the middle panel.

Lucky for Rosalba and myself there where also some doors that did not have an African theme that were rather nice. Of these we ended up buying two (shown on the left) for the front entrance of the strawbale home we are going to build.

This is the first purchase specifically for our strawbale house and we think at less than $600 in total we have done rather well.

I have found this site called Animoto that let’s you make short videos from pictures and music files. To play around with it I have made a short 30 second video featuring views from the site where we’ll build our new home.

Enjoy and let me know if you liked it.

Rosalba and I are spending the weekend in the shed on our land where we are going to build the straw bale house. On the picture you can see me editing this article using 100% renewable energy from our small solar power installation on the shed.

On the shed we have one solar panel installed and 200 Ah of battery storage. This system is ample for the little use it gets in the shed and manges to run the fan in of the composting toilet 24×7 plus all our lighting needs.

This system was installed in 2006 by Heinz of Ausolar for a modest investment of about $1,500. We have been very happy with the system as it has not missed a beat ever and even manages to charge the batteries in slightly overcast weather.

Having seen how well this solar system works has convinced Rosalba and me that our new strawbale house should make use of solar panels and maybe a windmill for most, if not all, it’s energy use. Of course the solar power system for our hose will be a lot more expensive than thise one for the shed and we are currently budgeting about $50,000 just for the solar power system.

To finish of this article I have included another picture as a treat. This time the picture is of the back of our property has seen from the back of the shed. It is impossible to fully capture the tranquillity the back half of our land provides.

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.