Flies
They don’t tell you about the flies when considering building a house using Straw Bales. Because crops are harvested in August or September, before we got our house wind and weather tight we could only watch as flies – by the thousand – swarmed in during the late autumn sunshine to settle in the nooks and crannies of our stacked-bales and made themselves comfortable for the winter. We didn’t hear a buzz out of them until last week when our friends arrived – the first people to sleep in the house-in-build.
Intending to make them welcome – our friends, not the flies …one of whom is an electrical engineer who’d arrived to install our Victron off-grid kit – we lit the fires to warm the house for the first time in their honour. Within an hour flies, emerging from hibernation early in the belief that spring had arrived, began to rain down from the rafters onto their heads, into our wine glasses, or simply to hit the floor with a soft ‘Pat’ whilst we sat chatting with one hand covering our glasses. There are only so many times you can apologise.
Gary got to grips quickly with the kit, designed a layout for them, and began a three-day read-the-manual, then-wire marathon.
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