Had a couple of willing workers for the last day of the Easter LWE, so we made a start on baling the house – it was definitely worth delaying the ‘public’ baling by a week, I’m a lot more prepared than I would have been if I’d rushed it.
Both of my helpers had worked on the shed, so we all picked a section and got stuck in. I’d expected to get very little done today; the shed had lots of large sections of straight wall, which I figured was as easy as it gets, while the house has lots of windows breaking up the walls. The difference I didn’t pick up was that the house has very few posts in the middle of sections of wall – they’re mostly bounding the openings, and I’d already decided to not bother with notching bales to fit up next to those posts, in favour of meshing them & filling with loose straw.
So the 1.2m walls between the bedroom windows, once we worked within the posts, became a ~1m gap – enough for a bale and one spare biscuit, with handy posts on both ends to hold it all in place. Place bale, add biscuit, next row. Another wider section was just enough to fit two full bales between the posts, albeit having to notch one for a post. By lunch time we had the entire NW corner baled to the tops of the windows, with just a small high angled section to finish it.
Worked our way around to the study door after lunch, then back around to the SE corner. Conveniently emptied my roll of strapping at about the same time as we ran out of energy for the day. I was extremely happy with how much we got done – the lower walls (compared to the shed) are incredibly easy to built, and the openings aren’t as much of a complication as I’d thought. End of the day photos:
