The Strawbale House:
Strawbale building, along with stacking adobe bricks is a complicated, messy, but fun process.
By using natural materials that are more plentiful to the area, thus causing less impact to the environment, you can appreciate your home more.

History of Strawbale building:
For centuries in Europe and Asia, bundles of unchopped lengthes of straw, tied together, then stacked with mud mortar were used to construct many walls.  Another ancient method, used loose straw that was packed into the walls, then a clay slip was used to coat the walls.  Those methods are still used today, though their popularity declined once modern building materials were made available.
In the late 1800’s, the US created a new method with the same material.  Baled hay and straw was a much easier and unified building block, and has spread all over the world since it’s use.
Europeans have flourished using strawbale construction, as well as the Central Amercias.

"Because sod houses, typical for settler dwellings elsewhere, could not stand on the soils of Nebraska, early pioneers used bales of prairie grass for construction material. When the prairie-grass-bale houses withstood even the extreme winters of Nebraska, the settlers quickly adopted the constructions as permanent homes. The invention of steam-powered balers in Nebraska in the late 1800s made straw easy to harvest and compress into bound bales.

Between the early 1900s and 1950s, straw bale was a much-used building method. However, in the 1950s, when mass-produced construction materials began to emerge, the older method lost popularity and was virtually unknown until its reintroduction in the early 1970s."
- Excerpt from Oberlin Online "US Strawbale Construction: A brief history"

The US Department of Energy has an excellent article on the benefits and random facts of Baled-Hay Construction. {check it out}

To check out our basic process, please view the online photo gallery.