I'm pretty much just copying and pasting from a recent Blog entry of mine. It seems to fit in here very nicely and could always use people's opinions. I'm new to this and just learning, but would REALLY love to build my own home, and this seems like the only way I could actually pull it of myself.
In my quest to get myself land and a home for the least amount of money possible, I have discovered Straw Bale Houses. Essentially, they are houses made of straw that are better than traditional houses in many ways. They are better insulated, better fire rating (Yeah that one surprised me too, but it's really condensed straw, have you ever tried to burn a phonebook?), and better sound proofing. Obviously though, the walls are about 3 -4 times thicker than regular walls, so you lose some space. In my case I plan on having plenty of space to build on so it won't matter.There are 2 main ways to put up a straw bale house :
1 - the Post and Beam set-up. This involves putting up a wooden post and beam structure for the 4 corners that will hold up the roof. So basically you make the Frame for a house like you would any other house, and then fill it in with Straw Bales. (More on this later) This method is best because it's a lot easier to get the building permits and insurance after.
2 -Load Bearing straw bale design, essentially it's when you literally put the roof directly on top of the straw bale walls. This involves needing to compress the straw bale walls before putting the roof in order to compensate for the settling of the walls later.
The straw bales are obviously not left exposed. They are covered with a mix of Plaster like materiels (Lime or cement, plaster, etc etc) with multiple coats until they make a solid wall. These walls look perfectly normal. The finished houses look gorgeous. They can be big or small. Since the outside walls start out of straw, they can be cut and shaped very easily to make for very interesting house shapes and corners.
The costs involved in building a straw bale house vary a lot. It's not "cheap" to build, the materiels still cost a lot of money. You need concrete for the foundation, you need LOTS of straw Bales, you need WOOD for the frame of the house, you need the roof structure itself (Lots of choices for kinds of roof though), you need plumbing installed (Which is beyond what I know how to do anyways) and most of all, you need MANY MANY MANY hours of labour. That last part is where you can save the most money if you do a lot of it yourself, except if it means you're not at work because you're building the house, it's still costing you the money you're losing by not working. I'm a self-employed technician, so I can pick the quietest months of the year for me to build my home so I won't be "losing" too much money while building. (Plus I'll get income from the work that gets done by subcontractors for my customers while I'm gone)
A straw bale house is a definite possibility for me and I will keep looking into it. There are still lots of parts of the construction process that I'm unsure of. Although I do love the earth-friendly part of this kind of home (saving lots of tree's kinda thing) I will only be building this kind of structure of it does mean significant savings for me in the end. A traditional structure I'm sure would sell for more if I ever needed to sell, and I won't need to explain or convince the bankers / insurance / permit people that a straw bale house is safe and legal.
Here are some links to some sites I've used to study about this :
http://www.solarhaven.org
http://www.balewatch.com
Just GOOGLE "Straw Bale Houses" and read away !
Thanks for reading, checkout http://www.techienation.com for more interesting subjects.