The building site as the first layers are stripped off
The meeting lasted three hours as we went into every detail of the design to ensure we are clear about what's coming up. To bring you up to speed, so far we have cleared a level platform for the building, measuring around 10m x 10m square and Nick, with his students, has marked out the foundations according to the plans supplied by Jenny. Nick has recently been on a straw-bale building course run by the Dorset Centre for Rural Skills so, as the rest of us are straw-bale virgins, we listen to what he has to say with great respect.
We are using rammed stone foundations, around 1.2m deep and will need 34.2 cubic metres of stone. Then on top of the foundations will sit two courses of used car tyres filled with crushed stone to act as a damp-proof course and lift the bales off the ground. Stainless steel bars and plates set in the foundations, will anchor the wall-plate into the ground, to keep the building from flying off in a strong wind.
Next came the debate about what the tyres measure. The local ATS outlet is going to collect them for us and they are 185/65 R14s. We wrestle with it for a while until Justin gets up and goes out into the car park to crouch behind people's cars measuring their tyres. Lucky to escape without arrest he returns to tell us the average for an R14 is 570mm. So Jenny will factor that into her design and that will determine the exact dimensions for the foundations. As the digger is arriving on Monday to start to dig the foundations, and Nick needs to mark them out (again!) before Monday, she'll have to be quick. Nick has been to visit our bales, which have been made and are sitting in a barn in nearby Marldon, and Jenny is worried that they are slightly shorter than she had allowed. Nick is quite relaxed about it all though - he's been on the course and claims that the bales can easily be cut to size to fit whatever the main dimensions are.He is even rash enough to say that once we have got the ring-plate in over the tyres, the bale walls will go up in a matter of two days. We shall see.
Things are really going to start happening next week as the foundations should be completed by the end of the week. Then we hope to install the car tyres by early December, followed by the ring-plate, which is a timber base for the straw bales, to be pre-fabricated at the College and assembled on site. A Christmas break will give us all time to draw breath, before we get the straw bale walls up in January.
On the media front Mark Gilmartin, the Trust's IT expert, is setting up a time-lapse camera so we can make one of those speeded-up films of the whole build, and meanwhile the College's media department are going to make a documentary of the whole project. We'll post some of the pictures on this blog as we go, hope you find it interesting!
