Myrna Fletcher wants you to know that you, too, could build a straw bale house.

The energetic great-grandmother is closing in on her dream of living in an energy-efficient straw bale house -- a dream that's taken about three-and-a-half years so far to build, mostly by hand.

Outside it may be steamy, 90-plus degree July days, but it's considerably cooler inside her Southwest-themed, 2,700-square-foot northeast Norman house. There a couple of layers of Oklahoma red mud mixed with sand and chopped straw cover the straw bales, lovingly applied by Fletcher, friends and family including several grandchildren.

"It has the heart of everybody who's worked (on it)," she says, noting a hand print here or a grandson's name there.

Fletcher laughs her infectious laugh when she talks about why she'd do such a thing.

"No. 1, to get (Oklahoma Electric Cooperative) out of my pocket," she says.

Fletcher regularly gets the jokes about the three little pigs, huffing and puffing and blowing her house down, which sits perched on top of a hill on 24th Avenue NE down a crepe-myrtle and rosemary-lined gravel driveway.

That won't happen. She has a nice, concrete safe room built in the middle of the almost-finished house, complete with bathroom facilities.

The retired registered nurse, who was transplant coordinator at OU Health Sciences Center in the '70s and '80s, got the idea to build a straw bale house about a dozen years ago when she first read "The Straw Bale House," authored in 1994 by David Bainbridge, Bill Steen and Athena Swentzell Steen, with David Eisenberg.

Fletcher worked on educating herself on how to build a straw bale house, attending seminars and absorbing ideas wherever she found them.

"I had to learn along the way," Fletcher says.

And she helped friend April Harrington build her straw-bale-constructed bakery in Lexington.

Fletcher had heard about Norman-based architect Dave Boeck and thought he just might be interested in designing her unique structure.

"Dave was ready to think outside the box," Fletcher says.

She had ideas about what she wanted and Boeck put them into design form.