SB: Re: A Better Mousetrap - my mousetrap in concept

["Mike Rubey" <Rubey@starband.net>]

Hi Andreas,
I don't have any digital photos. (I gotta do that!)

We talked about the possibility of a multistoried building using this
technique and though none of us are engineers or architects (and we would
have an engineer intimately involved before attempting a multistoried
project) we feel like the balecage technique could be applied to a building
going up quite a few stories. It is very, very strong. It is essentially a
ferro-cement structure with strawbale insulation.
It would also be very simple to apply heavy steel-beam barn building
technique to a multistory strawbale project. It would go up really fast.
Steel is so cheap compared to lumber and your talking whole other levels of
strength. Along with being recyclable and your material being potentially
recycled.
We kept joking when we were building this place about where the material
came from, war machinery, missiles, pink Cadillacs, old Harley's, Ferrari's,
etc etc.

I failed to mention a thing or two about our project in my original post.
This house is 2000sq.ft. inside the walls. I designed the house and added
the balewidth.
The window and door treatments are original as far as we know. I installed a
1X6 float within each window and door buck to be removed and replaced by the
actual jamb. We installed stucco stop against these floats so when the
stucco was done the float came out and there was this nice pocket that the
finish jamb popped right into. As I built all of the window jambs, windows
and door jambs out of local juniper, there was no problem with post-stucco
installation.
The interior sill curve was accomplished using foam and expanded metal
lathe. One person did all of the sill curve work to maintain uniformity. We
squared off the exterior sills and are very happy with the softly squared
stucco result.
Also from the time we broke ground it was one month to the day when we had
the bale raising.
I had a professional crew do the slab, when it was two days old I scribed it
1/4" deep on a 16" grid with two blades on a concrete saw for a 1/2" kerf.