Seattle's first strawbale bedroom is a work of art and love

How to build a strawbale bedroom: Take lots of polar fleece, and rain, and mud, and straw (of course), and coffee, and a solar panel and can-do friends and neighbors. Mix well. Nourish with a "feastival" at the end of Day 1.

For "Team Stucco": Add more polar fleece and tea and rain and volunteers galore and windows and soup and bloody fingers and mud (the stucco kind) and hugs for friends new and old. Trowel-on liberally.

Brenda Ajbour's house in Bryant is a work in progress.

And a work of love.

This has been a real save-and-build deal for a single mom on a teacher's salary. She took on a downstairs renter to even afford the place. That left one bedroom. Ajbour gave it to Etri, her 18-year-old son (teenagers are best stored in bedrooms).

Ajbour? "I've been sleeping in the kitchen for three years!"

Not anymore. With the last coat of exterior stucco dry, Ajbour finally has a real room to call her own: Seattle's first permitted strawbale project at 256 square feet. Her architect, Sage Saskill, calls it "Brenda's strawbale oasis."

It is, too. Butter-yellow walls as thick as, well, a bale of straw; fat, stucco window sills, concrete floors. A little truth window exposing the room's straw guts.

But something else was revealed, too.

Ajbour knew she would get a womb of a room; she wasn't, however, prepared for the people. They came and worked, and kept coming and kept working. Through snow and rain and bitter wet cold. Strangers, some of them. A guy from Brussels. Etri's friends from Roosevelt. Volunteers and donations (the contractor threw in the tubing and labor for the solar-heated floor). The whole project took on that old-timey-Seattle-outdoors-hippie-alt-culture-inventiveness feeling some of us thought fell out of fashion with Birkenstocks and tie-dye.

"People worked nine and 10 hours for a bowl of soup! I was not prepared for the outpouring," Ajbour says, still amazed, changed. "We had regulars, and friends of friends; people who saw it on the Web site. That blew me away. One day I went out back and my new boss was there. Just showed up."

They came to help build a bedroom and left as family.