By Jeff Feldman

In a quiet corner of south Jefferson County, the skeleton of a house greets the morning sun. This post and beam framework is a gathering point this morning, drawing people from miles around who have come to raise the walls that will enclose the oaken bones of a home slowly being transformed from blueprint sketch into constructed reality. Instead of piles of lumber stacked about, the building site is stocked with bales of straw—about 680 of them all together. This is the strawbale home of Linda and Scot DeGraf, and about a dozen of us have come together in this strawbaling workshop to gain some hands-on experience in building with bales while supporting Linda and Scot in building their dream.

When it comes to strawbale construction, there’s an obvious first question: why straw? And there’s a simple initial answer: insulation. A wall of strawbales laid up “on the flat” provides 18-inches of insulation between you and the outside world. Insulation is measured in R-value, representing a material’s resistance to heat flow. An 18-inch thick strawbale wall has an insulation value approaching R-40. This far exceeds the R-13 of a 2×4-studded, fluffy, pink fiberglass-filled, conventional wall system. In short, strawbale homes require far less energy to keep warm in winter and cool in summer.

Leading the strawbaling workshop is Sigi Koko, a green designer and strawbale expert out of Philadelphia. Through her firm, Down to Earth Design, Koko has fingerprints on strawbale homes all over the mid-Atlantic region. “It’s like building with big fuzzy bricks,” Kogo says of strawbaling as she demonstrates how to resize, bevel, and notch bales with an old-style carpenter’s handsaw.

There are a host of good reasons for strawbale building in addition to its benefits for the planet and lower heating costs. Straw is a locally sourced material—the bales the DeGrafs are using came from right here in Jefferson County—meaning it has lower embodied energy than most building materials. Straw walls breathe, leading to a higher degree of air quality within the structure. Straw is the stalk of the plant left behind after harvesting a grain crop like wheat or barley; using it for wall construction gives this “leftover” material a longer, more functional life than if it were to become horse bedding or landscaping mulch.

With the workshop group satisfied as to the benefits of building with straw, we quickly move along to a flurry of next most-obvious questions: What about fire, pests, rot, and the huffing and puffing Big Bad Wolf? Living in a strawbale home myself, I’ve heard enough Three Little Pigs jokes to last me a lifetime. As for fire and pests, neither is a real concern. Straw compressed into a bale doesn’t combust easily because there is little oxygen in it. Because straw is the stalk of the grain, not the grain itself, there’s no food value of interest to any potential pests.

Moisture is the one issue that strawbale builders need to be concerned about. The bales can get wet on the outside—the edges will dry out just fine—but if moisture finds its way to the middle of a bale wall, you’ll have rot. For this reason, strawbale construction principles call for toe-ups to keep the bales raised up off the ground, waterproofing at roofline and windowsill areas, elimination of vapor barriers that might trap moisture within the walls, and other moisture-mitigating measures.

Strawbale walls allow you to do some things that are harder to pull off with conventional building approaches. The DeGrafs have two areas of their home that include curving walls. With 18-inches of thickness, niches and nooks may be carved right into strawbale walls. And there is a tradition in strawbale homes to leave a bit of straw exposed in the form of a “truth window”, a porthole into the truth of the home’s construction.

By day’s end, several walls of the DeGraf home have arisen, and the workshop participants are weary, sweaty, and covered in straw. As we all step back to admire our work, there’s a clear sense of satisfaction within the group. There’s something honest about building with straw, a material so light on the planet composed into a structure so sheltering. We all wish Linda and Scot many comfortable and happy years in their home built of straw.

For information on Sigi Koko and her strawbale design and building work, visit www.buildnaturally.com.

Jeff Feldman runs GreenPath Consulting, a green building consulting firm. Jeff and his wife Kristin Alexander live in a strawbale home in Berkeley County. You can reach Jeff at jfeld33@aol.com