Planning a Straw bale House
The planning of a straw bale house is not that different from a normal house. You will still need to draw plans, get a DA, get a builder or a Owner builder license. You will probably need building insurance or public liability as a minimum.
Specifics for Straw bale
Some specific points about designing for straw bale. Firstly, consider the financial and labour cost. Many people believe straw bale is cheap. It can be, but the real savings is in the running cost of the house. It is VERY labour intensive. Many underestimate just how big a job it is to render the walls. Another factor to look at is availability of small straw bales. They are getting harder to acquire due to modern machinery using larger bales. Secondly, plan for some of the little things like window flashings and finishs. Where are you going to mount curtains? If you can avoid putting water services into a strawbale wall than that will save you lots of heartache. We simply, after rendering the strawbale wall, built out a stud wall off the outside wall to use as a bathroom wall.
Another point is think about window and door bucks. I used plywood box beams. However if I had given more consideration during the design phase to the window buck I would have realised that in our load bearing construction, we would have been better off constructing a box beam for the entire perimeter of the building instead of using lintels. All the lintels nearly meet up anyway and joining them together would have made life much easier during assembly.
Council
Normal rules and regulations will need to be met. Unfortunately Australia is well behind some of the other places in the world such as Mexico, New Zealand and America in regard to Straw bale Standards. Our local council could not accept the International Straw Bale Code of Construction. We had to get an Engineer to sign off on the walls or our house. We used John Zhang (hillbridge@gmail.com). He was quite reasonable and has lots of experience with Strawbale engineering. Our trusses were designed and manufactured by a truss manufacturer locally. The footings we just made BIG using 500x500 strip of concrete and piers going down 1.2 meters. This meets the standard for masonary construction on our soil. Overall the local council has been very good to deal with considering the type of construction this house is.