The Last Straw: Getting Frank with Steve - A conversation with Steve MacDonald and Frank Meyer

Getting Frank with Steve
A conversation with Steve MacDonald and Frank Meyer
Issue #25, 1999

interviewed by Mark Piepkorn

Frank and Steve finally met each other on December 30, 1998 in Gila, NM, at Steve's modest strawbale house.

Steve MacDonald was one of the earliest pioneers in the strawbale resurgence, is the co-author with Matts Myhrman of Build it with Bales, and helped introduce strawbale building to Mongolia a few years back.

The Thangmaker from Austin, TX, Frank Meyer, no slouch himself, had returned about a month earlier from a trip to China, where he supervised the construction of a school—the first strawbale building there. [See TLS#24 p30.]

My planned interview with Steve turned into a lively and wide-ranging conversation between these two characters when I had the good fortune to have Frank come with me.

- Mark Piepkorn, editor

Steve: Coming back from Mongolia to the U.S., you can look at everything for a little while with clearer eyes, or different eyes. My God, we've got infinite options of what we want and can do. In rural Mongolia, scale is dictated just by the limited stuff you've got. Not many options for diversity of resources to go into it, and there just isn't the money to get too carried away.

Frank: In rural China, they have a very human scale, very sane; it's been dictated by what they can afford. The vernacular is very small houses.

Steve: In this country, we need to think about scale, and use less resources. But that doesn't always seem to apply when you get to the scale of the ever-bigger American house. We'll reap what we sow somewhere down the line, I guess. It seems that when I make change is when I have to, and I don't think I'm any different than a lot of other people.

But there's a lot of folks who don't have a lot of money, and just from necessity will build at a scale that makes sense. We're really a pretty skewed standard of living from nearly everybody else. Maybe, thinking on this in a more global sense... don't despair.

Frank: I feel like we're on the runaway train, here. But I don't feel that big houses are necessarily bad. There's a real place for strawbale in commercial construction, and if people don't build quarter-million-dollar houses with bales in them, they won't start using it for commercial purposes. So that level serves a necessary function. It's going to bring it to a lot of people's awareness that otherwise wouldn't have ever thought about it.

This house I'm building now is 1700sf... it's a sane size of a house, but only one person is planning on living there. It's bigger than it needs to be, certainly. Thing is, this house is going to last a long time. In 10 or 20 years, a family of four or six may occupy it; so in a number of ways, it's very sane.

Steve: I think the place where we need to stay mindful is that that level of building can result in real control exerted on others and the way they want to go with it. A restrictive code developed from that basis can really affect the options of someone from going as simple and low-tech as they see practical.

I have a limited view, but I'd say there's far more low-tech buildings that have gone up than those big glamorous ones, and there are still a tremendous number of small-scale strawbales going up. My neighbors just plastered one a few weeks ago.

So is there anything that can be done as far as getting people to think twice about too-big and too-complex resource-intensive houses, whether they're strawbale or anything else? Well, preaching ain't gonna do it, I don't think.

And I don't know that you can, or that you would even want to, protect ourselves from ourselves. Certainly if you go to the scale of public buildings, that's a different matter. But I've always strongly felt that I'll use my common sense, and the wisdom of my neighbors, whatever I can get, and take my shot at it.

On small buildings, straw seems pretty forgiving. If you get into big buildings, and two-story buildings, you need engineering savvy. I'd expect that if you're paying somebody to do it as a contractor, you're probably going to have some fairly rigid demands because you're pouring your money into that... and if you're doing something big, that just because of scale it's going to be expensive, you don't want to screw up.

Sometimes people get overeager in lots of ways, and things suffer.

Frank: I think people are going to build scary and crummy strawbale buildings, just like they build stick-frame scary and crummy buildings. I think the important thing is that we're not judged by the materials, but by the techniques. It needs to be well-qualified that anybody can build a crummy building. It's going to happen.

There's always going to be people, like myself, that are so hands-on, that I just couldn't wait to get very educated for my first strawbale building. I had to talk to Matts [Myhrman] on the phone (pounds fist on table) this week and start building that sucker... and that's why we had the problems we had. Had I talked to people long enough, researched more... [See the end of this interview to find out what he's talking about.]

Steve: It always depends on local materials, local climate... and individuals informing themselves to the point where they can make a rational decision. In Mongolia, it made sense to do non-load-bearing, given the quality of the bales. It seemed the safest way to go.

Frank: In China, with that baler we had, load-bearing was a great option. They don't have much wood; there's hardly any wood-frame buildings up there. They're all cob, adobe, all the contemporary stuff is brick. And all the old buildings were wrapped with brick; a lot of them were falling apart.

Cob is great stuff. We did an interior cob wall on a project last year [see the Fall 1998 issue of CobWeb, the newsletter of the Cob Cottage Company. Contact Cob Cottage at PO Box 123, Cottage Grove OR 97424; ph/fax 541 942-2005]. It's this 3" or 4" curved cob wall, really stout... it's very cool, you hit it, whomp!, and it rings like a bell, bonnnngggggggg. If you did a mix like that on the inside of a strawbale wall, you've got a seriously-high-performance building, with that kind of insulated thermal mass.

Steve: All my buildings here are earthen plastered. I've always used stucco netting reinforcement with earthen plasters, and it seemed useful; but it's one giant pain. I don't have much experience seeing non-reinforced ones. My neighbors up here, that stucco netting was the most frustrating aspect of the whole job. It's not cheap, either.

Frank: It's the expensive part of strawbale, speaking as a contractor. That's where I can't compete with conventional building. When I'm paying guys 12, 15, 20 dollars an hour, it eats up all the competitive edge that straw's got. A great place to save money, I think, is to orient all your bales the same way, and don't do netting on the inside. Or outside, if you choose to do it that way.

On my house, we used lime plaster inside, with no netting or reinforcement except around the doors and windows. I knew I wasn't going to use netting on the inside, so I put all the cut sides in. I always use reinforcing around doors and windows, expanded-metal lath, but in a wide-open field, it depends on how tight the bales are. If you have a lot of stuffing, those are problem areas for plastering. If you have tight-fitting bales and minimal stuffing, it's just not necessary.

Steve: And how valuable is the mesh when it's sewn right up tight against the bales; if it's not embedding in the stucco, how valuable is it? But certainly, given the irregularity of bales, if it's tight here, it won't be tight there. Generally, I guess it does seem to embed, especially if you're paying attention that you do get it embedded when you're stuccoing.

Frank: Straw really does want to grab plaster. Straw likes to grab liquid, and when it dries... it works.

Height is a consideration. An unreinforced two-story wall, that's scary, and stupid. If the plaster ever does decide to come off, it'll kill anybody within a mile. First eight feet, not a problem; I don't want any unreinforced stucco to go up higher than that, unless you know you've got those good cut ends, and you're whap, keying the stucco in there, locking it in really good. But if that gives from those uncut bales up there, even a little bit, gravity's going to do the rest of it. Wham. That's scary.

What I'm wanting to do on this next one is set up a chainsaw as a rip, and rip all the bales so that I've got two cut sides. The cut side just really grabs that plaster great. It seems like, if you built a jig with an electric chainsaw with a big bar on it, set it up like a table saw, just push them through... 500 bales, that's a lot of pushing. But then you look at what you save on all that detailing, and I think it'll add up.

Steve: In Mongolia we had such poor-quality bales that I didn't think we were keying in very well to those mushballs. So do you pin your bales in Texas?

Frank: I have, but I won't any more. I just did it because of, you know, the books by you and Matts and everybody.

Steve: I never do it anymore. I can see it while you're raising the walls and they get tippy, it might be useful, but that's the only use I've seen by them.

Frank: The corset system's great, corseting on the inside and outside. [See TLS#24 p34, and this issue pp 4, 5, 7, 15, 19, 22, 25, 26...] I think that part of the text ought to be rewritten, to do things that way. Easier and stronger, and it's self-aligning, too.

Steve: That's the danger of codifying anything.

The wall stuff I was really an advocate for, and remain so, is the retrofit. In Mongolia, gers [yurts] didn't always make sense. They did if you were moving around a lot. But there's a lot of old buildings; you don't necessarily need a new one, you just need to retrofit an old one.

We were hoping to do one before we left Mongolia, but ran out of time. I would have made a cribbed-in gravel bottom to get my bales up, and I would've just jammed the bales up against the boards on the existing wall and plastered, inside the house and out, sealing up the whole wall. What we need to think about is just fixing up what we got.

This strawbale thing ten years ago was fairly easy to track. Now it's just everywhere, in all varieties... and how people learn about it? Hear it. Read it. It just ripples. Somebody knows somebody who has experience with it, and it just carries on.

"The building laws should provide only for such requirements with respect to building construction and closely related matters as are absolutely necessary for the protection of persons who have no voice in the manner of construction or the arrangement of buildings with which they involuntarily come in contact. Thus, when buildings are comparatively small, are far apart, and their use is limited to the owners and builders of them, so that, in case of failures of any kind that are not a source of danger to others, no necessity for building restriction would exist."

- Rudolph Miller, founder of the Building Officials Conference of America (BOCA), in 1915. Requoted from the book Mortgage Free! by Rob Roy, published by Chelsea Green, 1998... which in turn had quoted it from the book The Owner-Builder and the Code, by Kern, Kogon, and Thallon, published by Scribner's, 1976.

What was Frank talking about when he said "I just couldn't wait to get very educated for my first strawbale building"? He explains:

"As a lifelong undergraduate student at SHK (the School of Hard Knocks), I'm still finding that the most powerful learning tool is the common mistake.

"The credit is hard to own up to, but having made this particular blunder several years ago, I feel I'm way overdue to relate this lesson to the strawbale class at large.

"We received our bales for a load-bearing building from two different sources. About half of the bales were tight and well-compressed, and the other half were of the spongecake variety. I didn't realize the potential pitfalls of this scenario.

"At wall-raising time, all the tight bales and the loose bales wound up on opposite walls. After stacking seven courses, we noticed that one wall was almost two inches shorter than the other... and it was obvious that the weight of the roof would only make the situation worse.

"In a late-night panic phone call to Professor Steve Kemble, it was decided that the best solution to our problem was to disassemble the walls, manually recompress and retie the loose bales, shuffle the bales around and restack the walls. It worked, and the building is now going into its sixth year and passing the test of time with honors.

"The lesson: make sure the bales are of sufficient density before stacking (about 7 lbs. per cu. ft. per Build it with Bales II, p17), especially on a load-bearing structure."

- Frank Meyer

"My house is where I wanted to put my energy, and it wasn't necessarily to make money. My time doing other stuff seemed more important. I can certainly put it in great philosophical context, but it often comes down to just practicality. Going small, not going through a bank, self-build, was a choice I made because I wanted to keep our options open to follow our bliss, wherever that is. Getting in debt is not one way to do it. It's too much of a trap. I have other things to do.

"For me, it also makes sense in a philosophical framework. But while I would love to be able to jibe my life with my philosophy consistently, it's not always that easy."

- Steve MacDonald