About how many bales does it take to build a standard, load-bearing house?
The answer isn’t as cut and dried as the straw that will be baled up for you house. The x-factors are: how big is a standard house and how large are your bales? For Arm of the Spiral, I ordered 220 three-string bales and used about 180 for my walls. I stacked the 42-inch long, 23-inch wide bales on their side, four courses high. I liked the idea of having the straw on end to bear the load. If you thought of them like soda straws, instinctively you’d place them on end if you wanted them to hold up a weight. I believe “Serious Straw Bale” was an advocate for this method. However, many people have built load-bearing structures with bales stacked flat (strings up and down). It’s much easier to sculpt nichos and other features this way. In this case, you’d use two-string bales that are about 36 inches long. Now, let’s move on to the size of a standard house. I kind of like a 24-foot by 50-foot footprint for two people, that gives you 1200 square feet (some of which is taken up by the bales)
