First Corner

After a long trip from Lithuania, the EcoCocon wall panels finally arrived at the site.

The panels consist of a load-bearing wood frame densely packed with straw (110 kg/m3, about 7 lb/ft3).

The panels are light enough to be moved by two (strong) people.

However, a mechanical loader helps a lot.

EcoCocon recommends starting with a corner and building out from there. The panels have dowels to align them, and get screwed together, but not anchored in the base plate yet. Once a whole wall has been completed, all the panels get screwed to the base plate.

It’s great to see the view out the future dining room window.

At the end of the day, the panels were temporarily wrapped in plastic to protect against rain. This will be replaced by the airtight membrane on the outside, and the cover on the inside is only needed until the roof is in place.

Just as we were wrapping that up, we did indeed get some drops, and quickly got tarps over the rest of the panels.

This is the result after one day with only two workers new to these panels. They picked up speed as the day went on, and plan to be back with a bigger crew on Monday.

With a total of 100 panels, one of the challenges was getting all the right panels from storage to the site before they were needed. This would have been easier if we could have unloaded the container directly on site, but the timing on that didn’t quite work out.