straw-bale buildings have been around
since about the late 1800s as soon as John Deere and others invented the
baling machine out on the plains they were building sod homes it was easy for
them to look at these big bricks and think about like oh man that that looks
bigger and better than stacking sod one of the key concepts of minimizing
carbon footprint is to minimize your concrete use so the students and I
excavated a big two foot wide trench there is 44 inches of washed stone and
then on top of that we poured a real minimal beam out of concrete so it's
only eight inches thick and then there's two rows of block and then basically
just a sill plate that the straw rests on top of and the straw is just like big
building block we're getting ready to put these box beams on the top and they'll
connect down to these rods that go down into the foundation and that will
compress these walls and make them really firm and stout the roof won't
actually rest on the straw walls we'll have a post and beam inside and the roof
will set on that post and beam I have a sawmill out at my farm and we were able
to salvage quite a few logs off of campus and students actually milled up
some cherry and some oak and elm timber that will be used in this project so
some of central campus is represented up here and North Campus as well with the
timber that's going to be used in this project so after the walls are
compressed they'll literally take a weed whacker and level out these walls and
get them looking nice and straight and then we'll do three coats of earthen
plaster on it the first one is basically just a mud coat it's just literally clay
soil and water. this has like real long chunks of straw, so we'll have like
lots of tensile strength to fill in large gaps but when we do the final
adobe we want something that's much smoother so we have a shredder over
there to take down these long chunks to like itty bitty pieces of paper threaded straw
that will then mix with clay and sand to make a much finer mix. and then our
final coat will be basically the same with a little bit less straw and some
lime putty and the lime will make it more water proof so it should make it
more weather durable and also harder to the touch the students actually were
real proactive thinking about a little solar system for this so thry wrote a
Planet Blue grant and Program in the Environment is supporting that as well
and this will be to the best of my knowledge the first official University
of Michigan building that's 100 percent solar-powered and 100 percent
off the grid