The Wall Raising

The Index

• Main
• The Journal
• Previous Page
• This Page
• Next Page

The Wall Raising

Finally after what seemed liked years :) the day of the wall raising finally came. I determined to start the day as normal and walked to the Strathcona Farmers market for some groceries for the week. Maybe to help with the nervousness. When I returned to the site at about 9:00am David and his brother Doug were there and getting things ready to go. Before I knew it there were a few people who showed up. Some were curious to see what was going on, others had heard my interview on Ched radio the day before or heard their news broadcast which gave out my address.

We talked about the strategy for the day. We decided to omit the south window to make the job go smoother. The less you have to trim or sew bales the better. We were also aware of bale frenzy, so we were to assign "wall wardens" to make sure that the walls go up smoothly and correctly. A little after 10:00am we had a few hands starting to show up. I was honored to have to get the first bale and we cut it to first and it was in place at 9:30am. We started the first course. It went quite quick. We were sure to make sure that the bales were snug. It was fun to lay down the first course, impaling them on the rebar. The bales typically measure 36"x16"x14" but they were a little bit larger. They really cannot be an exact size, but straw is forgiving! These bales were quite well packed.

The hour between 10:00am and 11:00am went by incredibly fast! People started showing up every few minutes. I found that after helping with the first course of bales that I was talking to people that had obvious questions. A sun photographer came and snapped some photos. A-Channel came and did some filming, ITV, the Journal, and CBC. Between them and the curious bystanders I did little actual physical work. A lot of talking. In fact, the wall was going up so quick that I decided that we would put in the south facing window just to slow the progress down. Good thing, we were done with the wall raising by 11:30am.

To come: teenage wall wardens, strawbale staple bending & pounding, bale sawing and bale sewing techniques, and much much more....

There was good media coverage of this event. Thanks to Christine for videotaping this for me and Ricky for capturing the video onto the computer. The following format is real audio. I will convert the 19M and 36M avi files to mpegs sooner or later.

Anyways, here is the 6 o'clock news opening highlights showing us as one of the stories:

• (small=150K)
• (large=1.1M !!Outta of room - not included!)

• (small=266K)
• (large=2.2M)

The two Edmonton newspapers also featured us:
Sun Newspaper (85K)
Journal Newspaper (160K)

Okay, following are some random clips of the day.

(Phew, my tenants moved out and so I am moving upstairs from the basement *right now*, so I will get back to this as soon as I can. I wanted to get this started. More to come!)

Other Views

ciao,
-rob