The Saga of the building a straw bale house Part 1

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My partner Peter and I moved to Tasmania in 2001 after I received a welcome redundancy package from the government department in New South Wales, Australia. My profession there was to investigate, design and project manage construction of sewerage and water supply systems.

That was an extremely interesting job but the slogging through bushland, over hill and over dale, to find suitable environmentally friendly sites became quite exhausting. Especially when one community where both water and sewerage were upgraded and the 'natives' tended to have questionable crops. Fortunately I not only didn't come across one, I also didn't get shot at. Danger pay should have been involved.

In Tasmania I became employed by the largest privately owned building management companies in Australis. As a result the range of jobs was from the very big to the quite small, with many of the smaller ones being revamps of schools and public buildings that generally contained asbestos. Once again danger pay, but my subcontractors were very competent with the removal of this.

Needless to say that was also an interesting job but unfortunately the big financial crisis hit and the big construction jobs vanished and I became involuntarily redundant.

This was not what I wanted but we decided it was a good time to start our alternative style house. I had a lot of recycled building products from my demolition project so the first activity was getting these cleaned up for use.

Due to the construction and requirements for managing bush fires we had to clear a number of trees and decided to have them milled on site so nothing was wasted. We ended up with three racks of milled timber and a lot of firewood!

Often our cat, Katie, would drive up with us and make her presence know. Why is it that cats like being high; is it to establish their superiority over us, their slaves!

Part 2 in the saga, preparing the site, will be published when I find time from slinging mud, literally, at strawbales.

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Recent Comments

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Looking forward to part II. This sounds like quite the project!

It is quite a project and most likely will be the topic of my next website when I figure out how to present it and make money!

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