Yesterday I learned the basics of how to build load-bearing straw-bale structures. Now you can learn in turn, an even more compact essence of the lessons, thus:- Straw bales are cheap, easy to heft around, and easy to work with.
- Even a structure of load-bearing straw-bales still involves lumps of wood to compact the straw into its load-bearing form, and associated hammering of nails.
- Straw bales are held in place, especially before compression, by the expedient method of hammering wooden stakes through them.
- Realising you are simultaneously wearing a long trenchcoat, wearing fencing gloves, standing on a raised platform and holding aloft a mallet and long wooden stake is quite amusing.
- Assembling a straw-bale wall is ridiculously fast, easy, and fun. Especially hammering stakes in.
- Mixing the subsequent and necessary lime-based surface rendering coat is tiring.
- Applying said lime-based rendering coat is messy and frustrating.
- Learning these skills from someone whose one-room straw-bale animal-shelter building has a rotted wall that needs repairing might not be the wisest idea.
Drawbacks aside, I assume these generalisable skills will serve me well, in the upcoming event of an apocalypse that destroys and/or zombifies all existing buildings and people. I'm not sure how well a straw-bale building will do at fighting a zombified brick building, but I look forward to finding out. In a few weeks I might also go back and learn how to build timber-frame buildings, which should help if my post-apocalypse house-collection has to fight an army of either big wolves or bad wolves, but, I gather, wouldn't fare much better against big bad wolves.
[17:58]
|