Regular visitors (virtual or real) will have seen that we've been building The LookOut, a new building near the Coffee Shop. It's an eco-friendly building, and unusually for building projects, we (staff and volunteers) are having a hands-on role in putting it up. A couple of weeks ago, we posted a photo-diary of us building the roof. Over the last week or so, we have built the walls, and over this weekend, we've been showing visitors (real ones) what we've been up to.
First gather your team. We're a mixed crew: some staff, some volunteers. Some who are quite handy and have done a bit of DIY or building work before, and some of who haven't (like me!). Everyone's given up time from whatever else they might have been doing to help create The LookOut. It's been hard work, fuelled by tea and cake, but it's also been a lot of fun. We've been guided by Barbara Jones from Strawworks (bottom left, in the yellow hat) and greatly helped by Peter and Matt from Greenbuilt (centre and right, in the green hats), who, with Lewis, are doing the carpentry.
The bales were grown in Cheshire and donated to us by The Crown Estate. Each bale had to be 'dressed', stamping on it to get rid of any bends that occurred when the machine baled it and making the ends square so that they would fit together. This was the time-consuming bit and resulted in a few ouches as strands of straw went up your fingernails. Then we could get on with building the bales, as you would bricks, so that each overlapped the one below it. Unlike bricks, the bales aren't all exactly the same size so perhaps it was more like drystone walling, having to find a bale that would be just right. Sometimes we had to split a bale if we needed a smaller piece.
The next job was to sharpen some hazel poles. These are branches of coppiced hazel that are harvested for this use. Coppicing is a traditional part of woodland management and benefits wildlife by keeping the forest floor open and producing a variety of mixed age trees. The poles at the front of the building, beneath the windows, are short (as in the photo), but the ones for the main walls are about a metre long. We sharpened the ends to a point to make the next job easier.
When the wall was four bales high, we pushed the hazel poles through the straw bales. Each bale took two poles and these help to knit the wall together. The aim was to push the poles in as far as we could before resorting to the lumphammer. And we had to get them in perfectly straight, otherwise the pointy end would stick out of the wall. As the photo illustrates, this took a bit of effort (Conrad looks determined, Peter just looks a bit scared!).
But there's a limit to how far you can push the poles through the bales, so the point came when we handed Alastair a hammer and he had a fun 20 minutes banging the pegs home. The weather was wet several days last week so we had to work with the blue tarpaulins over the bales, which is a shame because it meant we weren't able to share with visitors what we were doing.
Once all the poles were in place in the bottom four rows, we continued building the bales up, though as each one went in, there was less room to work and there was a risk that us moving would cause the wall to bow outwards. By Thursday afternoon, we were seven bales high and had stuffed most of the remaining gap with part-bales.
Friday was a big day. Up to this point, the roof had been supported by some very large pieces of wood. The supports had done a great job, as the roof now weighs around 12 tonnes (much of this in straw and clay that we'd mixed and hoisted onto the roof last week). The weight will help to compress the straw and make the whole building solid. We set up 10 acrow-props, temporary steel supports with a screw thread so that we could gently lower the roof. In unison, one person on each prop turned the screw so that the roof was lowered gently to rest on the straw walls. This took over an hour as we had to ensure it all moved evenly, and then we removed the big wooden supports...
Collective breath was held... and nothing moved. The roof is now sitting squarely on the walls and the whole building feels very solid. We pushed another set of hazel poles through the top four bales and trimmed the bales inside The LookOut to make them even. We will now leave the walls for a week to let it all settle, and it's already evident how the weight of the roof is compressing the bales. But there's plenty of other things to be working on. Next week we'll finish the roof and build the floor before we come back to work on the walls.
I've been showing visitors round The LookOut over the weekend and there's been lots of interest in the way it's been built, and everyone's looking forward to coming back to see it finished. We've still got a long way to go, but we can at least see that it's a building now.
The LookOut is part of our Conwy Connections project, giving RSPB Conwy a makeover - read more about it here.
Julian HughesSite Manager, Conwy