The bed was a fairly simple construction. All the main work was put into destroying the bullhead that was above the staircase. Unfortuantely, I can’t find the ‘before’ photo I had of it, so all I have is of the wall after I had ripped it out, but the bare brickwork shows how much was covered.

After taking that down, I had to buy one 2m long length of wood which would support the bed frame which I salvaged from the old bunk bed I took down (also from FreeCycle a year ago!). The rest of the wood was used from an old pine double bed frame that I got last yearfrom someone on.. you guessed it, FreeCycle!

By chipping away with a wood chisel and some cuts with a saw, I was able to put in the grooves needed for the wood to slot in nicely and before I knew it, some screws here and there, and my bed frame was complete. All I need now is some plasterboard to cover up the brickwork, and I’ve got myself a nice bed, which is a little higher than usual, but nothing to complain about, considering how close the old one was to the ceiling!

My spare room is a little cramped, with a bunk bed supplying a comfy place of rest for a guest. It isn’t, however, very light, and the bed is close to the ceiling! As a result, I have come up with a plan to take down the bulkhead in the room (see what a bulkhead is at the bottom of this post!) and construct a bed over the top of it. Work has commenced, and I will be posting up progress, as I need to get it done before I have guests come and visit!

Fortunately, I am able to do this at little cost. I have parts of an old pine double bed which will form the frame, and the old bunk bed can be used in part as a base for the mattress and other parts here and there. As for a new desk for the computer, I have collected some ideas on my Pinterest board, which I will implement into a little pallet craft for the home. I’m excited to see the results of all this tinkering, and hope I can do it while the weather is wet. If it gets warmer, I might end up rushing back out into the garden, as that’s my real priority!

****WHAT IS A BULKHEAD?****

Good point. A bulkhead (in this example, at least) is the area above the stairs that invades the room above. See this photo for a pictorial example. (taken from www.builderbill-diy-help.com)

The photos show the trench I have dug so far, some of the stones in the ground and the wall I have built with the ones I have pulled out. Time will tell how many there are in total that come out, but at the moment, I can’t see an end, and they are big old stones! I hope it doesn’t have an effect on the schedule for the volunteering weekend coming up! I’ll continue working on getting them moved.

As you can see (hopefully) the rock starts by the tyre, and goes up past the end of the spade! I marked it, so its the white streaks. Unfortunately, I was planning on laying tyres there, but I will have to raise up the next course a little with flat stones and just build on top of it. Ultimately, it won’t affect my plans too much (though I have to redirect my drainage pipe around it as a result), and its reassuring to know that my building will be on such solid footings! However, It’s a reminder that I need to be adaptable to my plans. If I hit something like this in an area where I can’t just work around it, it will cause me serious problems getting it out! Given my house is just below an old quarry, I will have to keep my fingers crossed as I dig!!

I’ve made an order for drainage fabrics and waterproof lining for the back of the garden, so I am hopeful that by the time that weekend comes around, I will be into the stage of digging out the drainage ditches for the back of the building, and looking to get a few tyres rammed as the foundation of the building. There will also be plenty to do with regards to digging out roots and back filling some of the ditches I’ve got in the garden.

So. thats the dates set. I hope people are able to make it, and with the summer on its way, the rain might have stopped by then, and we will have a thoroughly beautiful weekend! Looking forward to meeting new people and seeing old faces there!

Its basically a site where you can post things you like on a wall so you can collect a scrapbook, for want of a better word, of the things you like. So, in need of inspiration for how I will make this tyre wall look attractive on the outside, I searched “tyre wall pinterest” on google and got some brilliant ideas!

Check out some of these photos. I’m going to try a combination of these to break up the long wall, and make it stand out in a nice way. Lets hope I have some spare time in the summer for it! If you have any ideas on how the tyre wall can be decorated with a low budget, let me know!

Shaping Bales

As long as it’s done properly, there is no reason why you can’t build yourself a circular straw bale building. Shaping bales is reasonably easy with the right tools, and we even resorted to chainsaws to cut notches into the bales. I found as a buliding material, it can be quite forgiving with regards to accuracy (though thats not an excuse to be inaccurate!) so playing around with the shape and edges is good fun. Just make sure they are tied well, and packed in so as not to be too loose in a wall. You have to remember that over time, they may settle, so a tightly packed bale is of the upmost importance.

Covering bales

To withstand the weather, you would assume that bales need to be plastered as soon as they are put on. I was surprised to find that this is not the case. While is not necessarily advisable to leave bales uncovered, as long as there is a decent roof covering, they should be able to withstand weather, given time to dry out. Water does not soak in, unless it ends up at the top of the bale, with gravity pulling it in. The photo below (taken in March) shows a bale wall that was built in September, and was still in reasonably good shape despite going through the winter. There had been development of some patches of damp, especially above the door frame, where the fold of plastic had caught water and allowed the straw to sit in it. Also, the lack of an overhanging roof meant that the walls were not as covered as they should have been, ideally.

Chicken Wire

When plastering the walls on the straw bale course, we used chicken wire to cover the bales, and assist in the plastering. There was a split with regards to if this was a good or a bad thing. You can see in the photo below the chicken wire.

For the first course, it certainly made plastering easier, and probably would result in the use of less plaster. However, I thought that it might result in the plaster not tying itself into the bales quite as well, and though it is more effort to get that first course of plaster into the straw, the knowledge that it is mixed directly into a bale, and not with chicken wire would be better for me. In areas where the chicken wire strayed from the bale, I felt like the plaster might end up leaving a hollow part of wall, which could result in potential long term weakness. (This was addressed by pinning the chicken wire into the bales at these points, but I remain unconvinced!)

Plastering – Clay vs Lime

to be continued.

The before and after photo shows how much we dug out and rammed into all those tyres that got done. I’m massively chuffed with the progress thats been made, and I’m going to crack on over May and see if we can sort out another weekend in June, this time with some cheerful weather to suit the attitude of all the people who came along. I’m looking at the 9th and 10th June for the next weekend, so I’ll send out an email soon. Until then, I’ve got a inspection looming in work, and some writing up to do for the Ecuador trip, not to mention some coursework to complete for my NVQ in stewarding! Busy times ahead.

Thanks again, and hopefully see you soon at a future event!

I wanted to make a post about the volunteering this week, so people know whats going on. I’m still waiting on more accurate forcasts, but the weather seems on and off. I think it might be a little wet on Saturday morning, but the bulk of the day should be dry. Hopefully Sunday will be dry too.

So, we are going ahead! I’m going to get as many tyres as I can this week for people, and here is a rough outline of plans:

Arrival: Aim to arrive around 10am or later. I’ll give people a briefing so you know the general idea of whats going on, and where everything is.

Tools Needed: At the very least, bring yourself and a smile. If you have a shovel or a sledgehammer, bring that along too. if you are driving past a garage and want to bring some tyres, make sure they are 175′s. (Ask the garage man and he will be happy to give them to you!)

Food Needed: I will be sorting out a BBQ and will have some stuff for lunch, but if you bring snacks you might find that helpful for your energy, if you have a particular requirement for food, let me know and we can try and sort something out.

Getting here: If you need to know where I live, you need to contact me and I will sort out directions. If you have already sent me an email, I’ll get something out to you tonight or tomorrow with regards to directions. (got to get hold of my laptop, which I left at my parents!)

Times: We will probably work from about 10am to 12:30 then have some lunch, then go from 1:30 to 4:30 and have a BBQ. This is all very rough, and I suspect people will have lunch when they feel like it, rather than stick to a schedule. Its a work party, not a work day. Ultimately, you may arrive when you like, and leave when you like. The plan for Sunday is much the same for Saturday if you are up for it, but I suspect we will get the bulk of work done on the Saturday.

Weather: If there are any drastic changes in the weather, I’ll send an email out to participants and post here so keep checking your emails as the week goes on! I don’t think much will change though. (Fingers crossed!)

Questions?: Get in touch with me by sending me an email at alun.king<at>gmail<dot>com.

Cheers all, see you on Saturday!

Anyway, with a fortunate windfall from my mortgage last month, I managed to book a place on a straw bale building course last weekend. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but I had thought that I have a chance of building with the bales late this year, so I wanted to ensure that I was capable of building with the bales, rather than just going off what I had read in books!

We all met in Redfield on Friday night, 11 people on the course in total. Everyone was friendly, from various backgrounds and very easy going. Everyone had a unique reason for being there, and it was refreshing to hear peoples ideas and understand how much variety you can get from building with such a simple material. We settled into the night with a brilliant meal cooked up by the people at Redfields and a straw bale DVD and presentation from our weekend tutor, Chug Tugby.

I should tell you about our accommodation. Redfield is a community in North Buckinghamshire which is a large mansion situated on 17 acres of beautiful grounds. If you are not familiar with the concept of a community, the idea is that families of people all live together, sharing the work of the land, and living communally. There is more information on their website –  http://www.redfieldcommunity.org.uk/. We stayed in a building off from the mansion, and it was a lovely building with a large social area, giving us plenty of space to get to know each other on the course.

On the Saturday, we all headed out to a nearby farm where we would be building our work. We spent the morning learning about tying bales, and cutting them to shape to lay into a wall. With the short tutorial out of the way, we quickly set about constructing the side of a barn wall. For the weekend, we worked on a straw bale infill wall, though straw can be used in load-bearing structures too. By the end of the day, we had completed the wall, and also some of the team had repaired a damp patch of a previously completed wall too.

Come Sunday, we were raring to go, and had a short lime tutorial. With gloves and aprons on, we set about covering the back of the barn with lime plaster. The first coat of plaster is often the hardest to put on, but with 11 of us working hard, we were more than able to get the entire back wall done in a matter of hours. Not too mean a task when you see the size of the barn wall!

All in all, I enjoyed the weekend. I felt like I became a lot more confident handling the bales and I don’t feel so scared of buying and building with straw bales anymore! I’m looking forward to taking delivery of them!! One of the biggest surprises of the weekend was discovering quite how weather-proof straw bale can be. I always had the impression that on building with bales, you would need to get the bales up, and the walls plastered as soon as possible, before any rain hit. While this is true if you have the bales uncovered, with a good roof, you don’t need to rush it quite as much!

As you will see in the photos, the barn we were building had a number of straw bale walls built before our arrival – these walls were put up in September 2011 and were (generally) still OK!* To back up this evidence of hardiness, we were shown around Redfield whilst staying there, and they had a number of straw bale buildings, which were mostly unflustered, and had been standing for up to 12 years! It taught me that as long as the roof I am planning has a decent overhang, there is absolutely no rush in getting the plaster sorted (though I will build and plaster it within a week hopefully!). Certainly means the building work will be a lot less stressful with regards to weather preparation!

If you are interested in booking yourself on a Straw Bale building course or something related, visit http://www.lowimpact.org