Gosh Sue, that's quite a collection of photos of your place. It looks absolutely beautiful, the landscape is fabulous. Your creatures must all be very happy living there (and you guys too!). Your strawbale house is quite palatial. I had expected something smaller -
There is a bit of visual illusion going on there!
It's actually only about 180 sqm plus a 20sqm attic. This is smaller than the ridiculously large houses Australians generally build these days (our nation now holds the world record for average house size, and it's not one to be proud of). We were adamant to make no duplicated anythings: Australian family homes offered by the major builders these days have informal and formal living areas, informal and formal dining areas, home theatres, and other forms of unnecessary duplication.
And now there's a new fashion starting: Outdoor kitchens, complete with refrigerators, to serve the outdoor dining areas (which have outdoor heaters...). More duplication! Really crazy in terms of environmental footprint, and actually cleaning, servicing and maintaining a house.
When I was 30, I shared a Federation house in Hobart, and I loved the philosophy of that architecture: There were generously sized bedrooms, one generous kitchen, one dining area, one living area. That was it. The ceilings were high and you felt like you could breathe. If you wanted to be alone you could go for a walk, or you could go to your bedroom and it didn't feel like a trap. If you were out in the shared spaces, you were social with everyone else. No splitting off into little cliques: All or nothing.
This experience really influenced me when we designed our own house. We've used exactly the same principles. The three bedrooms all take Queen beds, and there is one communal living/dining area with the kitchen in the corner. The attic is for private guests and doubles as an office for me. Two of the bedrooms are in a separate wing with a bathroom. This is a fine arrangement if you have children, but unfortunately we do not, so in our case we are going to be using that as a bed and breakfast wing for paying guests who are looking for eco-holidays (we are avid walkers and climbers of the local mountains and will be doing guided walks off the beaten track).
The reason the house looks large is in part that we have high ceilings (like that Federation house), which rake extra-high in the living area. The communal space feels like a cross between a library, a greenhouse and a Middle Eastern chapel. It's an amazing space to be in, and I much prefer that to having a larger floor space. (But my word, did it complicate the building process! We spent weeks plastering off scaffolds out of buckets...and still have a little of that to go.)
...althrough I thought the strawbales were generally load-bearing, whereas it looks as if you have used a timber frame construction so I guess that allows two stories.
Actually, you can have multiple storeys whether you do load-bearing or infill construction. Infill construction is easier to get passed by the local authorities and it appealed to us because we didn't want to wait for ages for the bales to settle, or think about how to physically crush them down to their final equilibrium position with load-bearing construction.
Basically, if bales in load-bearing houses still settle after you plaster, your plaster will crack. With the infill method of construction, you're compressing as you go (we did it with fence wire loops and gripples, all of which stayed in place) and there are hard "stops" at the wall tops, held in place by the house frame.
Also with the infill method, you're working under a roof that's already keeping the place dry - people who build load-bearing houses have a problem if they get caught out by the rainy season coming around while they are still building walls. If the bales get wet through when building, you can throw them away and start again...
Did you have to order specially compact bales?
You have to make sure that the bales you get are super-dry, mould-free and tightly and evenly compressed.
And I'm not quite sure if you lined the whole house with plasterboard, or whether you plastered straight onto the bales in some places?
You have to plaster over every nook and cranny of a strawbale wall, to stop fire hazard and to protect the straw from damp. This is as true inside a house as out. A lot of water is vapourised during showering, cooking etc. The lime plaster "breathes" so that you don't get problems with condensation on the inside of the wall - which people get if they use a non-breathable plaster, or if they try to paint or waterproof their plaster. The lime plaster has a higher affinity for water than straw does, so if the plaster gets damp when it gets rained on, and if that causes dampness in the straw touching the plaster, the lime will suck the moisture straight back out the moment it dries. That's why lime plastering over natural materials is so durable, and it's actually a very ancient and well-tested technique.
We have some plasterboard in the house, but only for some of the internal dividing walls. This is made into feature colour walls and used for hanging photos etc.
You can plaster straight onto the straw. Mesh is only necessary around areas you want to shape, like window and door openings, and niches. The plaster gets pushed hard into the straw and penetrates to around 5cm. This is plenty of tooth (and makes for good arm muscles ;-)). Every wall needs three coats of lime plaster, so it's actually quite thick when finished.
(...these days someone just has to tap me and this information falls out. We get asked these questions a lot!
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Spain has a good climate for straw-bale construction. Seasonally arid is a real plus.