February - March 2006
The blackberries are on, and we're out there amongst them. I managed to get so far amongst them that I almost required surgical removal, hence no more flowing clothes or skirts while picking. Trev's been experimenting with blackberry wine and used a recipe from Tasmanian ABC, and blackberry jams and cordial. We've established a small garden on our rental property and are hanging out to get things happening on the block, but as the dam (now dug) and the rainwater tank are empty (the sheds aren't up yet), we'll have to wait till we have water before planting.
Council approval has finally been given for the erection of the two sheds. We've been waiting with bated breath as we need to get straw bales soon, before the season ends, or they all get rained on out in a paddock somewhere, and we'd have to wait another year before accessing more. The strawbales themselves are cheap, at $2.50 to $3.50 per bale, but delivery stacks on an extra $6 per bale. So we'll be out there loading hired trucks ourselves in order to get them cheaper. We need to keep costs as low as possible if we're going to acheive our goal of under $60,000.
We've been doing the media circus thing for the launch of the book. Most of which has been great. However we recently heard (we have yet to see) one particular mainstream media format make out that we are cult leaders with groupies, or cult members. This is patently ludicrous and has given us sleepless nights writhing with embarrassment and shame. Please understand that we never at any point said we did, implied we did or even thought we did. This slant was cobbled out of their insistance on knowing how many people have been inspired by us or have gone on and done something similar, our response was to say we'd had several hundred emails from people saying they'd felt inspired enough to start a vegie garden or install low wattage light bulbs. This does not make for groupies. Please accept our apologies if, having seen this, you wondered if it was you we were referring to. We've learnt our lesson. It won't happen again.
March 2006
Laying the slabs for the sheds left us with burning muscles and aching backs, but they were done! It seems like we're always racing around, but there isn't always a lot to show for it. However, we spent another week working on erecting the first shed. We discovered that some days are better than others to haul large sheets of corrogated iron around. By the time I figured this out I was on the other side of the block from where I'd begun. Then there were all the illusions to be 'shed' about easy kit set assembly. Caleb, our family Lego master, might have had better luck than we did. But one of them is up! It almost took flying lessons when we failed to tie everything down overnight, and judged the calm conditions as likely to continue. They did not, and we arrived back the next morning to find half the shed had tried to become airborne and required a few hours to re-erect.
The strawbales are now sitting in a large, lamington shaped bundle in the middle of the block. They're siting on black poly, covered in black poly and now have an additional silver tarp tied down over the top. Hopefully they'll only be there for the next week while we build the second shed and get electricity on.
We managed to save over $1000 by sourcing the strawbales as close to us as possible, and hiring a local and his two trucks, going out with them and assisting to load and unload.
We've also recently bought a secondhand Everhot combustion stove; we hope to use it to cook on in cool weather which will also boost the hot water and warm the house. The building of which is still some time away.
At this point we are going between engineer, draftsman and ourselves in ever decreasing circles, which will result in a meeting next week to nut out the final details. As we are trying to reduce the amount of concrete to a bare minimum, we are going about things using non-traditional methods. Teamed with high clay content sub-soils it's going to be a challenge. I'm going to be posting the house plan some stage soon.
The book has been well received in Australia; after it's first week on the market its sales put it in the top five best selling new releases. Which was great. There's an new SBS radio interview to listen to, it's been added to the sustainable building adventure main page.
Now that the initial set up is almost over Trev and I will be looking for jobs to help fund the house building. Caleb is thoroughly enjoying his return to school and obviously hasn't suffered academically or socially from his homeschooling stint.
As we still don't have water on site we've had to be content with growing a garden at our rental property. Gardening at the block consists of going on bracken fern bending sorties in our attempts to reduce its spread. Bracken fern is poisonous to animals, it tends to outcompete surrounding vegetation, and is highly flammable, none of which are good and especially not in a fire prone area. So bending bracken it is, and at this rate, for quite a while. The blackberries are also rife, but we hope that the goats we will be buying at some point will help keep them under control.
Caleb bending bracken in exchange for Lego money.
March 25
Still to-ing and fro-ing with engineers and draftsmen, but it seems we are slowly getting there. I'm learning lots, especially how sexist the building industry can be. So there has been a bit of mutual sinus clearing going on. However, it looks at this stage as if we can build the house with NO cement products. Which is better than we had hoped for. The house will be on stumps of celery top pine which has an inground lifespan of around 90 years. They will be down to rock and surrounded in compacted fine crushed gravel (FCG). Looks like the big issue at the moment is articulation joints. We wish to put the bales right to roof level. However there is some debate going on as to whether this will result in cracking due to movement. We're happy to put up with fine cracking and see it as a minor and expected maintenance issue during the first five or so years, in which we will be plonking on more lime wash each year anyway. We'll get there. We're not dealing with a typical type of building material.
The design is very simple.
I've included Trev & my basic plans to give an idea of what we wish to achieve.
We've since had to remove one set of double doors as moving the pole frame spacing around made it impossible to include the third set. The house is on the smaller side, at less than 150m2, (external wall size, as the bales being 45cm wide take up considerable floor space). Smaller houses, of course, have a lower embodied energy than a large house, so it was the first place we could easily lower the total energy usage of materials. We also imagine we will be thankful for reduced wall area while rendering! We feel happy with it.
It's not shown in the plan but there will be two wall screens in the triangular bathroom that will block off a third of the bathroom which will be used as the laundry area.
We're installing guttering on the shed roofs, and power on to the sheds so Trev can start making window frames. As per usual the cost of doing anything has increased dramatically. We have a power pole on our property and only 10 metres from the sheds, but it will cost $2000 or more to get power on. We're making jokes about being forced to live 6 months without spending a dollar through neccesity this time and not choice. We'll get there.
Our timber will be sourced from around 500 metres away. A local man has a one man sawmill and he uses forestry timber that is considered too small for anything but firewood, but he is able to make usable construction timber from it at a fraction of the price. Apart from the obvious financial advantages, we will be further lowering embodied energy and locking up timber that would, undoubtedly, have been burnt as firewood.
We can't wait to get started, but it will a while yet before it's through the council. We'll keep you posted.
As to Caleb, he's still loving it. He had the school swimming carnival last week and blitzed his races, no doubt an aspect of being an ex-Qlder and used to spending many more hours underwater than the average Tasmanian child.
We've had two light frosts, but so far Caleb is enjoying going to bed with a hot water bottle (how cool!)
His subscription to Horrible Science turned up this week with 4 fake, but very realistic cockroaches. He planted them around the house and delighted in my horrified shriek. They are definately one aspect of the subtropics I have no issue with leaving behind.
Still to-ing and fro-ing with engineers and draftsmen, but it seems we are slowly getting there. I'm learning lots, especially how sexist the building industry can be. So there has been a bit of mutual sinus clearing going on. However, it looks at this stage as if we can build the house with NO cement products. Which is better than we had hoped for. The house will be on stumps of celery top pine which has an inground lifespan of around 90 years. They will be down to rock and surrounded in compacted fine crushed gravel (FCG). Looks like the big issue at the moment is articulation joints. We wish to put the bales right to roof level. However there is some debate going on as to whether this will result in cracking due to movement. We're happy to put up with fine cracking and see it as a minor and expected maintenance issue during the first five or so years, in which we will be plonking on more lime wash each year anyway. We'll get there. We're not dealing with a typical type of building material.
The design is very simple.
I've included Trev & my basic plans to give an idea of what we wish to achieve.
We've since had to remove one set of double doors as moving the pole frame spacing around made it impossible to include the third set. The house is on the smaller side, at less than 150m2, (external wall size, as the bales being 45cm wide take up considerable floor space). Smaller houses, of course, have a lower embodied energy than a large house, so it was the first place we could easily lower the total energy usage of materials. We also imagine we will be thankful for reduced wall area while rendering! We feel happy with it.
It's not shown in the plan but there will be two wall screens in the triangular bathroom that will block off a third of the bathroom which will be used as the laundry area.
We're installing guttering on the shed roofs, and power on to the sheds so Trev can start making window frames. As per usual the cost of doing anything has increased dramatically. We have a power pole on our property and only 10 metres from the sheds, but it will cost $2000 or more to get power on. We're making jokes about being forced to live 6 months without spending a dollar through neccesity this time and not choice. We'll get there.
Our timber will be sourced from around 500 metres away. A local man has a one man sawmill and he uses forestry timber that is considered too small for anything but firewood, but he is able to make usable construction timber from it at a fraction of the price. Apart from the obvious financial advantages, we will be further lowering embodied energy and locking up timber that would, undoubtedly, have been burnt as firewood.
We can't wait to get started, but it will a while yet before it's through the council. We'll keep you posted.
As to Caleb, he's still loving it. He had the school swimming carnival last week and blitzed his races, no doubt an aspect of being an ex-Qlder and used to spending many more hours underwater than the average Tasmanian child.
We've had two light frosts, but so far Caleb is enjoying going to bed with a hot water bottle (how cool!)
His subscription to Horrible Science turned up this week with 4 fake, but very realistic cockroaches. He planted them around the house and delighted in my horrified shriek. They are definately one aspect of the subtropics I have no issue with leaving behind.
March 27
Tonight it's salmon bites, last week it was salmon with ginger glaze. The photo beneath, of Trev posing with salmon is a complete fraud, as he didn't catch it, but it was given to him by our new neighbours.
Not that it's stopped him pulling the wool
over a few pairs of eyes. Apparently this girl was an escapee from one of the local fish farms. Trev, ate the roe rolled in breadcrumbs and fried. Caleb and I gracefully declined all offers to partake of that particular meal. Now he's making cream of oyster soup (snot soup) after having ducked down for a quick scrape of snot off the rocks.Trev & I spent a day or so getting the sheds prettied up with guttering. It turns out the sheds were never meant to be geared up with the frilly bits and we will have to muck around lowering door heights so we will still be able to open them. A tad disappointing. Never thought to ask if they were compatible with guttering.
We take the no PVC thing seriously, and we've used poly pipe. Which makes for unwieldy lengths, of 'damn it I wanna curve' material. But we're getting there. One shed fully operational, the second will have to wait till we've come up with something interesting in the way of a right angle bend.
