Customer Reviews

Straw Bale Details: A Manual for Designers and Builders (Natural Building Series)

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4 star:		(2)
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2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

This is a great book for people who have looked at the picture books and decided to build in strawbale. It is excellent whether you are an owner builder planning to prepare your own plans, or simply want to pass the detail on to your architect or draftsperson. I like the spiral bound layout which allows you to leave the book open without breaking the spine. The authors have considered most types of strawbale construction (e.g. with and without cellar, timber floored, concrete slab,etc) but a big negative for me was that it deals only with single storey details. I want to build two storey and would have appreciated information on how to incorporate the middle floor into the strawbale walls, both for load-bearing and post-and-beam buildings. If you've read architectural plans before, you'll be able to decode how to build a strawbale house... if you can't, you won't have a use for this book. All in all - a winner for the serious strawbale builder (cheaper than a strawbale workshop and you get a resource you can keep!)

If you're interested in strawbale building this is a nice little book on many of the details involved.
The first 20 or so pages tell about various facets of the concept, they're followed by several short chapters (each with a written detail section)on things like walls, windows, foundations, electrical wiring and so on. Each of these sections consists primarily of architectural detail drawings of the chapter subject.
There's a lot of detail here but I don't think it's enough for the total novice to go out and build from. You(if you're a novice)will need a lot more information on construction than is provided here. I guess that Amazon probably has all of the books you'll need, I think they do have all of the strawbale books listed in the short bibliography, those are worth a look.

I was very excited about receiving this book but I was very disappointed when I did. Not much info and the black and white drawings have a Notes section that is not numbered to correspond with the drawings or the one page text for each section. Overall, I feel this book was not a help at all.

This was a pricey manual that has no content. It contains very few pages and the information in them is available elsewhere for less money.

I have quite a few strawbale books, and I think this one I probably could have done without. Don't plan on using this book alone to do any projects.