Strawbale House

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?