House at end of working bee.

The straw bale wall raising weekend was an unqualified success. All the bales, except for the last row, were in place at the end of the weekend. Our bedroom wall was one exception with the determined Andy smacking in the last row on Saturday afternoon (video to come).  Perry and Dave were also determined in getting the ‘return wall’ finished on Sunday and left their mark.

Jan (Perry’s partner) and Gary (a most determined and skilful handyman) and his wife, Joy worked with me on the kitchen and pantry walls. Thanks also to Tim and his lovely wife, Kate who are hopefully getting their straw bale house happening soon. Thanks to George, Andy, Yucca and  Marie and friend who came on Saturday. On Sunday I’d like to thank Pascal and Pascal for their help and their discussion on solar cookers which they have imported for sale. Anyone interested in buying one see http://pgoux.free.fr/ParabolicSolarCooker.htm

Talking about cooking, the workers could not have had the energy to continue if it were not for the cooking of my friends Lindel and Col. Also in this area thanks to Alex, Nicholas and Melinda for being go-fors. Great work guys!

some of our helpers

Thank you also to our building team, Nick , Roger and Andrew who gave up

their weekend to impart their valuable knowledge of strawbale building and supervise the weekend. Mark will embed some videos of the weekend in future posts. For those that are impatient check out:

http://www.metacafe.com/channels/msb17/

If I have left anyone out my sincerest apologies and please let me know so I can include you in the next post. Rosalba

Our neighbour has recommended her roofer, Andrew. He had her octagonal house roof up in a week and he says ours should be the same. So once the roof is on the strawbales can be delivered and the fun really starts.

It’s incredibly hot and dry. Over 39 degrees celcius in the middle of the day and these guys just keep on working – absolutely amazing! Yours truly (Rosalba) had great difficulty keeping up with them in the middle of the day and had to sit in the shade for a bit and soak my hat in water. Even the normally delightful afternoon breeze was just hot wind. The guys had to construct a shaded area for the generator as it was overheating in the sun! Even with these super guys working for us, we won’t have a roof on before Christmas so you’ll have to wait until after New Year for the straw bale episode. Happy holidays!

Looking from dining to bedroom

ensuite

In the wet areas and as thermal mass, it was decided to use timbercrete: waste sawdust, cement and sand which is formed into blocks/bricks and air dried. The beauty of this product is that it can be nailed into and cut  like wood, it is lighter weight than similar sized masonary. I went for the larger block as I have lived with brick feature walls in our last house for 13 years and was over it. The other option was mudbrick. I feel the benefit of mudbrick is if you make it yourself and thereby save money and fuel miles not having it delivered, but if I have to have them delivered from afar then I can’t see the point! We wanted the house finished in our lifetime so we chose the timbercrete. As you can see the hexagonal windows did prove to be a bit of a challenge to the bricklayer, Mike Pascoe but nothing he can’t handle – awesome bloke! The local carpenter, Johan, was finding the framing for the straw bales very challenging. He kept muttering the word – difficult. So as a sign of mercy and peace of mind for myself, I let him go. Instead we now have “it’s not a train crash” Nick and Roger of www.strawbalehouse.com.au who specialise in straw bale building.  Nick and Roger believe that they can get the timber frame up before Christmas. We’re hoping to do a wall raising one weekend soon so stay tuned! I’ll try to remember the video camera for that one. Rosalba

Timbercrete blocks (for wet areas and feature walls) have arrived and need a little longer to dry out before being laid. Timbercrete is waste timber shavings mixed with cement to create building blocks. You can saw them and you can nail into them! To get the full details of these amazing blocks check out www.timbercrete.com.au . Why didn’t we do the whole house with them?- price!

Timber should arrive this week from Cypress supplies in Caboolture. It seems we were lucky to get the cypress pine that we did get second hand – it is very rare and not that much cheaper than new. This cypress is farmed sustainably and grows in Queensland. Roofing iron arrived today from North Coast Demolitions. It is new roofing iron, just left overs and job lot returns. Mark and I spent last Saturday morning sorting out which bits we wanted. Local transport guy, Rick was able to deliver it all today.

Stay tuned, it’s only getting more exciting!

We are trying to keep our impact on the environment as low as possible, so we are constantly on the lookout for second hand items. Ebay has been great for the doors, windows, pavers (heaps) and some timber.

Some items I thought we were stuck with buying new i.e. the spa. Fortunately for us, one of my acupuncture clients turned out to be the owner of the Reno Barn in Tarragindi. So Mark and I, plans in hand, investigated the place one Monday afternoon.

Wow, what a treasure house! Beautiful stained glass from old pubs and demolished government buildings, kitchens, lighting, fireplaces, furniture, windows and  doors (sizes on them), timber (already denailed) plus some really cute memorabilia is on display, all neatly stacked and catalogued. Nuccia was awesome in helping us find what we needed: recycled cypress pine (didn’t know you could get it), hardwood posts, spa with working motor, laundry tubs, toilet suites, and best of all windows with stained glass for the servery.

e’d been looking for months for the servery windows on Ebay and they were always the wrong size or they were sold before we could put a bid in. So we were delighted with the find. Plus they delivered – hooray! Nuccia is still keeping an eye out for any more recycled cypress for us.

So I can highly recommend the Reno Barn – www.therenobarn.com at 526 Tarragindi Road, Salisbury QLD 4107 (Evans Road End)
Phone Number: (07) 3274 5663 (Yep, shameless plug but they deserve it, just check out the pics)

Rosalba standing in the kitchen

We have got our plans approved and we have now started building.

We have found a great concreter and block layer (Mike Pascoe from Witta) that is doing the foundations work for us. Once Mike set out where the concrete pad will go we realised that the one retaining block wall we have would have been 2 meters tall. So we decided to dig into the hill by about one meter. This will mean a bit more earthworks but on the positive side, that concrete pad will be on a very strong foundation of bed rock.

Maniac with a chainsaw

While all of the foundations are done, I have been busy cutting down some trees that we have now found would be too close to the house. One of them was a large spotted gum of which we have kept the straighter and larger branches to use as hand rails on the veranda and the steps.

We have also kept the staight part of the trunk in the hope that we’ll find someone with a portable sawmill who would make step treads out of it.

We bought two sets and in this picture you can see the second set how it was delivered before we have assembled it and installed it. Most parts can easily be handled by a single person except for the uprights which you can see at the bottom of the pack. The uprights are really heavy and are still quite heavy even when carrying with two people. The only tools we needed where a couple of spanners and a tin snip to cut the bands holding the packs together.

In this next picture we have already assembled one set of this “Meccano Set”. Assembling and setting this up took a bit more than 2 hours to do and was actually quite intensive. Setting this up was also made slightly more difficult by the fact that it was raining when we did it and all the parts where wet and a bit slippery. The shelving was easy to set-up, but you definitely want to be at least two people as carrying some of the bits by yourself is backbreaking.

This last picture shows how we have been able to already clear up the shed a bit and how much cleaner it looks than just having it all stacked on the floor.

Unfortunately we ran out of time and out of nuts to assemble the second set. So we have another set to assemble and set-up. We’ll most likely do that in about a fortnight which should also give the supplier of the shelving enough time send the missing nuts to us.

All in all, the shelving was not cheap, but it will defenitley out last us and every single arm on this shelving is rated to cary up to 500 kg, which will mean we can store almost anything on this shelving. The arms alre also adjustable which is great as well and we are really happy with it.

These handles have come of some doors where the builders installed the wrong type of handles on the internal doors on a large new building. The business where John works was employed to remove this handles from the doors and install the correct handles.

Believe it or not, as this handles already had been installed once, they couldn’t be sold as new and were just sitting in a corner in a box taking up space and were about to be thrown out, when John offered us these.

Of course we were only to happy to receive all the handles for our doors for free and we certainly don’t mind that they have been installed once before. In fact they do look brand new and have hardly been used ever.

Later on we also found some handles for our front doors on eBay. They were very reasonably priced at $68 inclusive postage, so we are quite happy about those as well.

So now we already have all internal doors, the main entrance doors, all the door handles we need and some of the windows.

On the planning side of things we are now waiting on some engineers drawings before we can submit the plans to the local council for building approval. It’s quite exciting and Rosalba can’t wait to actually start doing stuff on building our new home.