Our Straw Bale Walls Arrive as an Unexpected Storm Hits

This week on OSRL, the walls of our house get delivered but an unseasonable rainstorm threatens to ruin them. Can we get them protected in time? All right y'all, today is the day. We expect to get our straw bales today and I cannot wait. It's a little windy right now, we're definitely going to get some rain, so we're going to see how this all works out. The delivery guy just left. We got 60 bales of straw here. I guess I didn't know what to expect, how much straw it actually is, but that's a that's a big, it's a big mountain of straw. So we got that unloaded. Mostly him, the guy was a beast. I just probably more got in the way, but we got it all unloaded, ready to go. But we are expecting that rain, so we're going to have to get this tarped up and protected. She's curious and she's going to pee. All right, I suppose we got to tarp this whole thing up. Clouds are rolling in real fast. Bales are still tarped up real nice. It actually did kind of come loose for a little bit, but we got we got everything locked down. It's looking nice again. You ready for the rain? You ready for the rain? Waste not, want not. Get it while you can. You shouldn't put your goggles away if you're going to do that. Yuvie, you want to go for a walk? You want to go for a walk? This might be one of the last chances for her to get out and get a little exercise today because that rain could be coming down any minute now. I've brought this up before in previous videos. I mentioned that I suspect that most likely I'm autistic. Someone mentioned to me that they thought I might be autistic and I didn't really even understand what autism was. So then I started doing my own research and learning more about it and I'm like, oh that kind of sounds like me. You've actually been kind of researching this for years trying to figure out exactly because you know something isn't quite right with you. You knew something wasn't quite right with you. I didn't say that. That's you. I think you're perfect just the way you are. Okay yeah, that's yeah I have some particular challenges that I've always faced and I've always kind of wondered why I'm that way and just trying to understand myself when I came across autism and it kind of resonated with me. I've done some kind of informal assessments that seem to indicate that but now I decided that I want to seek a formal diagnosis. It's something I probably don't need to do. I'm in my 40s now. I've lived this far. I've made it this far but I do definitely struggle with some things. Having a diagnosis I can know for sure kind of what's going on. It would help me understand myself a little bit better. Maybe help me navigate the world and navigate these certain challenges in a better way. So yeah I just wanted to give that update to you and I'll let you know how it goes. We probably won't find out for the next video. It's going to take a little bit but we will let you know what happens with the screening if we go forth with the full diagnosis but that's pretty exciting. Yeah. Maybe some words of encouragement and support. She might need it during this time. Oh it's starting to rain y'all. It's coming down just a little bit right now but we'll see. We'll see how much we end up getting. This is nice. A little off season but I'll take it. Get those poly tanks filled again. Get the IBC totes filled again. Nice. Yuvie is out here with me. She's going to enjoy the rain. You gonna enjoy the rain too? Big stretchers. All right. Looks like it's starting to come down now. A little heavier but we'll see what we end up with. It's pretty exciting. Yuvie come on we gotta go. Come on. We're going for a walk. You up on the hill you seeing anything? What are you seeing? Little toad man. Good morning everyone. Well we survived the storm. I don't remember the rain coming down too heavy. Came you know just kind of a light rain but for hours. So it is would be interesting to see how much we get. I'm going to show you here in a minute but everything is definitely nice and soaked though. I'm glad we had those bales covered but obviously yesterday we couldn't do anything with the bales and I don't even know if we can do anything today but that's okay because I think we're going to need some lumber. We're going to need some more lumber to really cinch the bales in place and I'll show you what I mean but we're going to need a few more supplies so I'm going to take the opportunity since everything is soaked to get that done today and yeah just looking at the not a whole lot but almost a quarter of an inch. Yeah that's not too bad. I'll take it because it's definitely an unseasonable rain and of course right when we get those bales but yeah I'll take it like I said a little bit more water in the poly tanks a little more to help us see us through to next monsoon and yeah definitely take it. So I'll check back with you guys later and we're probably going to make a trip today pick up some more supplies. Another positive thing about the rain I mean not only are we catching more rain from our harvesting system but then the extra moisture in the air has really been amping up the production of the source panels. Now if you don't know about that we recently were able to take advantage of the Source Global. They produce these hydro panels that suck moisture out from the atmosphere and it gets condensed and pumped into a RO tank. The panels have been working really well for us. There was like a little bit of a hiccup with one of the panels going defective kind of right away but they brought on a new one and they've both been pumping really well. I think we've been getting about two to four liters of water a day with this rain I mean much more water in the atmosphere so we've definitely been producing. So yeah it's a nice little addition to the water out here and you know water is so precious so the fact that we were able to get these and free of cost was just pretty amazing. We'll take it. Good quality drinking water. Good quality water. All right y'all we're back from our little excursion. We had to get some more lumber and the lumber will actually serve a two-fold purpose. It's going to add more structure to our walls plus it'll sort of act as a pinning mechanism for the bales. You'll see what I mean here in a bit but I'm going to start putting up some of the lumber here on the west side of the north side of the house if you're following me and then we'll be ready for bales over here and then I'm just going to keep on moving down this north hand side but I still got plenty of lumber so if I can I'm going to also put some on the west side of the south side of the house. Well good morning everyone. It is a chilly morning. Almost touch freezing. Didn't quite get there. It's pretty close and it's pretty cold right now. UV is on guard duty. She's hearing coyotes out here. So temperatures out here are just touch freezing. 33 degrees. So temperature inside the dome has now hit 63 degrees. So far we haven't done any heating. Down in the bedroom it is 68 degrees which is right now just about perfect sleeping weather. Now I haven't lit up the rocket mass heater yet but I just checked and it has an absolutely perfect draw. I absolutely could light that up any time now but so far the temperatures have been comfortable so I haven't let that up yet but maybe I will soon because the temperatures are going to stay cold for a bit and maybe even dip below freezing so we'll see how that goes. So far still nice and comfy in the dome. With the rain we had the other day things are still a little wet around here so we hesitate to take the tarp off the bales just yet and start putting them down. You know I'd hate for the bales to start soaking up the water around here but that's okay I still got that wood and there's plenty to do before we start stacking those bales but we're very excited and also Yuvia looks like she's trying to hunt me. So I got my boards for this area cut. I'm gonna put them up and then just keep working my way around. Then I'll be all set for when we're ready to put down bales. Yeah I'm gonna get those to the top for you. Oh she says no work for you or she has a different job in mind for you. Mama you're not done. All right I got all your stuff set. Thank you. Gracias. De nada. Look at that we're a bilingual channel now. See now that the weather's nice and the wind's calm I can head back up to the top of the dome. Yep. Inside outside. Do you feel like this work can be kind of meditative? I know I usually listen to audiobooks or something while while working. I notice you don't tend to do that. Is there a particular reason why? I just like to focus on one thing I guess. Just focus on what I'm doing. Hey nothing wrong with that. All right I got all the boards I need over here on the north side of the house and I'm going to show you what's happening next. So I'll actually be throwing some boards over here on the south side of the house as well because this is going to be a straw bale wall as well. So I'll get some boards up here and we'll be ready to lay some bales on this side as well. All right well good morning. I got all my boards cut last night. I got a couple up there so I just got a couple more to put up and then this area will be done. Now I know I said I was done with the framing and I guess I don't know I guess you could say that this is framing but I tend to think it's more about putting the bales in place because you kind of need something to attach the bales to or some way to keep the bales stacked and make sure they're not moving. So you know again the bales will kind of lean up against this and then we're going to stack the bales up over here on top of the bags and then we'll have something in front. I think we're thinking about going with rebar and then we'll tie the bales between the rebar and the boards. So this is really coming along and I'm really excited to get to the bales. All right so all the lumber is in place. I'm going to start grabbing some rebar. You know it's something that we already have lying around so why not put it to use. I'm going to grab some of that out of our storage area and start cutting it up. All right I got uh all my rebar cut and we're good to go. So we're looking pretty good after the rain. Things are drying up pretty nicely. Things are still kind of cloudy so I don't know if there's still any more chances of rain but I think we might hold off on the bales just another couple of days but we're going to get started with that real soon. I'm very excited. You ready to go for a walk? You ready to go for a walk? Are you ready for a walk? Ready. You got enough layers on? Is it that cold already? It's chilly. How about the new additions I made to the house? Nice. You think we're all done with rain for a little bit? It is. Yuvie we're supposed to be going this way. Where you going? All right we're leaving. Hey there she is. Oh I gotta keep her warm because it's chilly out here. So very exciting. We got the bales delivered. I'm a little disappointed we didn't get any up yet but there's uh you know obviously just a couple things that we could do to get prepared. You can't control the weather. A little bit of a rain delay, a little bit of rain that day. Of course you know we weren't sure if it would rain next couple of days so we just wanted to keep things wrapped up and tight but uh it looks pretty clear now. Things are looking pretty good and I think we can start to lay down those bales. I know you got to be pretty excited about uh finally getting some bales on these walls. Getting, well the bales are the walls kind of. Yep getting the walls up. Well that's a big thing. That's a huge thing. Yeah. Man so very exciting. So stay tuned as we start putting up some straw bales. We are definitely ready. We will show you exactly what we're doing to sort of tie the bales into the building and get this whole thing tied in as a structure. And I know there's already been questions about straw bales. Like are these things going to deteriorate? Is it going to be a haven for rodents? If you have any other questions leave those down below and we'll try to address those as we move through this process. You know we're pretty new to this as well. We've definitely had some misconceptions about straw bales in the past ourselves. So you know we'll talk all about that coming up and I'm really excited to get these bales in place. So definitely stay tuned. So definitely give this video a thumbs up and we'll catch you on the next video. Bye!