Finally, plans for our strawbale house

Finally after what seems like an age we've got our house plans done and ready for submission to the local council.

These plans have developed from measurements we took of our current house and a bit of day dreaming about the kind of house we wanted to live, mixed in with a healthy dose of realism about what we thought we could actually build!

In the end we've come up with a 279 square meter house with 3 bedrooms, 1 bathroom , 2 composting loos and a generous living space. Bigger than some, but definitely smaller than many houses on the market, we're sure we'll enjoy living there for many years and hopefully never need any extensions.

Some of the extra features we've included are a mud room/laundry in the south eastern corner of the house - to deal with the mucky dogs, a large kitchen area with a big pantry as we expect to be doing a lot of preserving food and need somewhere to store it all. These certainly add to the overall floor space.

Click to enlarge the images below.

Plan view

Isometric View 1 - Shows how the house will fit into the hill.

Isometric 2 - A bit lower down, shows the verandah height at the north west corner (which should prove a good challenge!)

Sourdough baking

While Ali has been growing a bun in the mummy oven, I've been learning about the rewarding world of traditional sourdough baking. I did try this out during summer with very little success, but had more luck when Ali finally worked out what I was doing wrong (being too gentle with the starter mix instead of vigorous mixing) and since then every weekend has seen steadily improving loaves. Read more...

Google maps view of our block

As a wise man once said people love pictures, so click this post's title for a link to a google maps pic of the block and its location with some explanatory notes.

More pics to come in the Gallery including hopefully the plans at some stage once we own them and have a clearance to post them.

A course with Brian

We're really getting serious now, we even have a set of real plans you could build something from (hopefully a house).

The strawbale building course we attended 19-22 march with Brian Hodge of Anvill strawbale consultants proved to be a really valuable  experience. An eclectic crew of about 22 folks at very different stages of the process attended in and around Heathcote in Victoria. Most were locals with us the only ones from WA.

Brian took us thru many of the major facets of the building process, covering; the basics of the wall building themselves including the ins and outs of the bales themselves, the stump, sub floor and flooring process, timber framing the walls and fire proofing the sub floor, basic rendering mix and application, plus heaps of valuable tricks of the building trade and strawbale building that I certainly haven't read in any of the standard strawbale books.. All really valuable from our point of view, particularly as we took delivery from Brian of the plans he has created for us so we could reference back directly to them.

From the self-belief perspective it was awesome to meet some other folks with similar enthusiasm for straw bale building. There was a different range of skills at the course from qualified tradies to novices like us, great to see that the ideas around this type of building are appealing to a wide range of folks outside of just the alternative building crowd. Certainly made us feel we are on the right track and also that it was within our capabilities and also we can end up with a standard that we'll be happy with long term.

The plans from Brian are setup for owner builders basically they work in an overlay manner with page 1detailing the stump and subfloor, page 2 the floor joists and bearers, and so on right up to the roof setup. At each stage all the different timber is specified, fixings and set up of joinery is detailed in a separate document of cross sections. Enough detail is shown without overwhelming you with complexities which is a great move for us.

Still some final details to be nailed down though as we've now decided to have a verandah on the North, West and South sides of the house with a meter of roof then a pergola on all side. We think this will offer a nice flexible arrangement considering we're not really sure about the temperature enabled by solar passive design inside ths house. If we need more shade/coolness in summer we think a grape vine along the northern side pergola will work a treat, if not we can leave it off and it will still look fine.

On other fronts the shed is progressing with another trip down for Ali and  I to finalise the site works, the quote for concrete floor of the shed has arrived, pricey but necessary.

A bun in the oven and Fire ratings

This last month has seen quite a few changes around our Nannup dream and in another exciting direction.

We're now finally able to let everyone know that Ali is pregnant with the little grub due in August. Obviously this has changed things considerably in a wonderful way and we are both feeling hugely happy and lucky as we've been wishing for this for some time.

We are now delaying the move down to Nannup until well after the birth, most likely around the end of 2011, as I think anyone would agree it is not optimal to be attempting an owner build while living in a shed while having a baby. On the other hand we're stoked we'll be able to raise a kid in the country on our own place.

This is not to say that things are not progressing otherwise with Nannup council informing us of the need to have a fire rating of the property and planned house site completed before we can present our plans to council. Coincidentally this came at the same time as I had discovered some slightly disturbing info in Earth Garden magazine talking about the changes around building regulation in fire prone areas.

Basically AS3959-2009 Construction of Buildings in bushfire-prone areas is now being considered by Nannup council which meant we have had to undertake a fire risk assessment for our plans and where our buildings will be positioned.  The assessment allocates a Bushfire Attack Level to the home and shed site along a scale  from BAL-Low, BAL 12.5, 19, 29, 40, thru to the maximum BAL-FZ. The numbers relate to the expected heat flux of kilowatts per meter (kW/m2)BA-12.5 expected.  BAL-FZ  is the highest rating at FZ=Flame Zone. The assessment takes into account the slope , surrounding vegetation type and proximity. 

This freaked us out initially as an article in Earth Garden mentioned that the Building Control Commission in Victoria advised that there may be problems getting approval for a strawbale construction at ratings of BAL-19 and above and even some big restrictions at the lower ratings. Strawbale buildings have been tested under older standards but not the newer AS3959.

John Evans from South West Fire Services  met us at the block and in a matter of minutes allayed many of our fears about the site and the house position and thankfully with some adjustment we were able to have both the shed and the house rated at a BAL of 12.5.

We also had Ben Worthington from Worthy contracting come and discuss the earth moving requirements for what we want to do. With his advice and the fire assessment we've decided to move sites somewhat on the property nothing drastic but it is meaning another trip down this weekend to do a final measure up and tape out the house shed and water tank shapes to finalize the site plan.

Next up we are of to Victoria for our long awaited Strawbale building course with Brian Hodge, hopefully to iron out any final problems with our plans and get the all important skills with both of us  are really looking forward to getting to grips with the actual techniques we'll be using.