Well it feels like things are beginning to pick up. We got back from an excellent Straw Bale workshop in Angel's Camp put on by the California Straw Building Association (CASBA) and felt really good about where we were going. The workshop was taught by Patrick Hayes and Marcus Hardwick, both amazing people who know so much about the building process. It was great to see things in real life and get our hands on laying up some bales.
The road was cut by our excavating contractor the week before and the building pads were done. How big a difference it makes to see the totally undeveloped land you had all of a sudden have a place for you to build, it makes it so much more real. You can really visualize the house and how it integrates with the landscape.
Stephen finished the drawings for the Ag Building so we went out with the help of a friend named Ray whose an older Tehama County Native who has an immense knowledge of building houses. He is retired now, makes these intricate amazing quilts, has really interesting stories to tell and has expressed a desire to help us. He was excited about the challenge of doing something new and seriously just enjoyed the chance to help. What a wonderful and generous person. So...we took him up on his offer and he helped us stake out the Ag Building and also assisted in finding a trencher who could do the footing trench. He plans to work with us on laying the form boards for the ag building when its time.
At about the same time we also put up a small metal shed to store tools and such and started the stick framing on the pump-house. We got to finally rev-up the new 7000 watt Generac Generator which was much louder than we thought it would be :) and it worked great. This past week we also met Wil Maertens from Redding whose done a lot of work on Straw Bale houses among many other things, who was wonderfully kind enough to talk to us about some of his projects.We hope to work with him as a consultant.
We are now working on finding the engineer that will be right for our project. We have 3 options at this point that we are looking at. We are looking for a good balance between someone who sounds not only interested in our project, but who is not too far away, has done exterior pinning of bales before and hopefully has had experience doing the box column technique for post/beam.
We are also thinking that we may not be able to get our permit and our foundation poured on the main house until possibly after the rains of winter. But we shall see, at this point we are very much focused on just getting the Ag Building done, that will be a wonderful stepping stone accomplishment indeed.
