Strawbale House

Rosalba and I have been rather lucky as we have found about 87 m² of used slate tiles.

Last weekend I went to pick them up with our 1 tonne ute and a trailer.

I have to say that I seriously underestimated the weight of the slate tiles and I had to take it slowly up the Blackall range (at times I only managed second gear).

I even managed to ‘break’ the trailer just before unloading by driving over a sharp stone in the driveway and flattening one tyre.

The 87 m² of slate didn’t even all fit in the ute and trailer. I reckon I managed about 70-75% of the slate in the first trip. I’ll be picking up the rest of the slate tiles this Friday and luckily will be able to fit them in the ute only and won’t need the trailer.

We’ll use the slate tiles on the floor in the kitchen, dining, lounge, and the bathrooms.

Has anyone used slate tiles in the bathroom before and is there anything that you need to be mindful of?

Wanting to go fully solar not only for our hot water needs but also for our electricity needs we have purchased the book “Solar Success” by Collyn Rivers recently. The subtitle of the book “Getting It Right Every Time - The Complete Guide To Home & Property Systems” really got us interested.

I have just recently finished reading this book and have to say that it was a quite easy to read considering the topic and the book covers many aspects.

I really like how the book looks at the whole solar power system from a more holistic point than just from a technical point of view.

In the first part of the book Collyn discusses all sorts of energy consuming appliances that we have in our households nowadays with a view of highlighting where it makes sense to improve the efficiency of the appliance before installing the solar power system.

The second part covers the basics of any solar power system while also listing other alternative power sources and their feasibility.

Part three covers the design and scaling of a power system, highlighting the need for an energy audit to be able to work out how big your system needs to be.

Part four covers the basics of installing a solar power system. Interesting in this part I found the section about what you are allowed to do yourself and what you need to get a licensed electrician to do.

Part five covers the actual installation of a power system with lots of tips on how to make your system more effective and secure.

Part six describes some typical examples based on actual installations. This part of the book gives you a rough feel of the likely costs to set-up a solar power system. As this book has only been released in June this year the pricing is still quite applicable.

Part seven in the book talks about financing a solar power system and the various rebate schemes available in Australia.

In the last part Collyn then describes the solar power system he has got on his property. Collyn also describes living with solar power and that the biggest challenge for Collyn is dealing with visitors that are not used to conserving energy and that one visitor can basically double their daily power consumption easily.

All in all I heartily recommend this book to anyone that is interested in getting their own solar power installation. The book is not just easy to read but I can see it also becoming a little bit of a reference book for myself. It contains some simple formulas to work out electrical properties of various parts of a solar power system.

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.

Rosalba picked the book titled “Built Like A Woman” by Sandra Broman when we were looking at books to get more information about building a house. I have to admit that at first I thought that this book would not be very interesting for me.

Having just finished reading it now I have to say though that I would highly recommend this book to anyone (man or woman) that is thinking of building at least parts of a house themselves and has never done so before.

Sandra Broman’s style of writing is very easy to read and feels very personal. Almost as if Sandra was just sitting with you and talking over a cup of tea.

In “Built Like A Woman” Sandra Broman tells you about her own experience of renovating and building houses. Sandra confesses that before she started doing all this type of work she would wait for her husband to come home from work to drill any holes necessary and that she has gone from SEDI (Someone Else Does It) to proper DIY.

The book gives you a positive feeling about building your own house, that it’s not actually that hard, and that most people can do a fair bit themselves. Sandra Broman also included a chapter where she rates most major tasks during the building of a house from “Easy” to “Don’t mess with it”. This chapter gives you a quick primer what you could attempt to do yourself and what you should definitely leave for a professional tradesman.

This book is by no means a reference book but it nevertheless gives you a rough idea what you are getting yourself into when building your own home and at an affordable price of around $30 it is a great book to have.

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.

Rosalba and I have purchased a number of books recently covering sustainable homes to look for inspirations on what we would like in our future home. Most of these books we purchased from “The Good Life Book Club” that, I think, is run by Earth Garden.

The “Natural Home Builder - Volume One” book contains stories of 16 homes that were built using sustainable methods. The book contains lots of colour pictures and covers homes built using straw bales, mud bricks, stone, and timber.

Reading through this book you get a feeling of the enthusiasm of the owners of the various homes and you realize that building a home yourself, or at least parts of it, is not an insurmountable task. The stories are well written and the pictures show the unique aspects of each home very well.

Having finished this book leaves you wanting more and eager to get started on your own dream home.

A thoroughly recommended book if you are planning to build your own home using sustainable methods or if you just want to see what other people have been able to achieve.

Our architect recommended that we read the book “Building Your Straw Bale Home” by Brian Hodge, especially if we would like to do some things ourselves in the process of building our house. Brian Hodge is a builder with over 30 years experience in a large variety of building projects.

I bought our copy of this book earlier this week and have had a good browse through the book so far. Brian covers every aspect of building a straw bale house from how councils see straw bale houses all the way to step-by-step instructions supported by diagrams and photographs.

Brian’s writing style is easy to follow and straight to the point as you would expect and the illustrations are clear and helpful.

From my first impression I think this book will become an important source of reference for Rosalba and myself during the actual construction phase of our house for any tasks we perform ourselves and helping us to communicate more effectively with tradesmen and the builder.

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.

I am keen to use alternative energy generation with our new house as much as possible. Currently we are planning the main energy source to be solar panels installed on the roof of the shed and house.

I have recently look at what is available and have found what looks like quite a good deal on Jaycar Electronics’ website where you can find a wind turbine and generator producing up to 200 Watts at a very reasonable price of currently $499.

Granted this is a kit that needs to be assembled but considering it produces up to 200 Watts at half the cost of a solar panel that produces about 100 Watts, it is something I believe is worthwhile trying.

I can’t wait until our house is advanced enough that we can look into setting up one of these wind turbines.