Straw, glorious straw

My brother-in-law grows grain to feed to stock.  We came to an agreement where he would arrange for the harvesters to cut the wheat straw when they harvested the grain, for a price.  I love that  we made use of a farming waste product in the construction of our home.  It took very little extra energy on behalf of the harvester to cut and bale the straw when threshing the grain.

I had some great photos of the harvesting but they were lost when our computer crashed.  So imagine a dry paddock with wheat and a big green harvester spitting out square bales of straw tied together with yellow bale twine.

On January 8 2011, the straw bales were delivered and stacked, literally, to the rafters.  Well, they are technically joists but you get the idea.

You can see, in the photo above, that we had the foresight to put the floorboards for the attic into the roof space before the roof was put on.  The floorboards are 5m long and were slid up into the roof space from the south end of the shouse prior to the colourbond going on.

The weather was still against us with La Nina giving us her best.  On January 12 at just before midday, it looked like this and was cold enough to warrant long sleeves and a jumper.: