Month: March 2021

A couple of days working on the second half of the framing, now that I have a roof to work under. Bottom ladder went together pretty easily, albeit with some….interesting….arrangements around the 15° bend, and and the recessed section of wall at the pantry. Much muttered commentary about architects and their fancy ideas…. 😉 Very glad I’d dragged out my big drop saw for this – and conveniently the saw has a preset notch at 15° which made it much easier to flick back and…Continue Reading “Prepping for baling, and swearing at my architects…” →

Dragged together a group of family & friends to do the last big lifting task – getting the rest of the roof up. Hired two hoists this time – with some 11.5m panels, having two panels to control tilt, direction and stability seemed like a very good idea. Saturday I’d kinda planned this to be more of a ‘prep’ day – most of my big burly mates were lined up for Sunday, and I wasn’t confident we could do the final tilt-and-drop movement to lock…Continue Reading “Roofing weekend” →

Have giant trolley, will repurpose to carry anything else you need to move: It’s now a haycart. 😀

Nearmap randomly happened to be flying an update on the day we raised the first third of the house roof: The first two angled panels are up, and it looks like we’re standing around discussing how to get the third one up. 🙂

The random guy who came past my build and picked that I was doing strawbale on the basis of my bottom ladders, had his own strawbale house and garden on Gardening Australia over the weekend: https://iview.abc.net.au/show/gardening-australia/series/32/video/RF2005V005S00 Starting around 16:30.

My marri slabs were finally dry and out of the kiln, so I arranged to get my favourite toy for the weekend: to lift them off the trailer at my end. (the guy with the kiln has a handy tractor-forklift, but I don’t.) A couple of hours of driving and slinging, and they were happily filling my carport: There’s three stacks here – on the right is the main trunk of the tree, which was ~800mm wide, 3600mm long. Hidden behind the slab standing up…Continue Reading “Diggy diggy hole” →

Waiting for the second half of my roof panels to come in, so I got started framing the outer walls in the half that was already roofed. First was the super exciting waterproofing layer on the upstand, in between rainy days: then putting together the bottom ladders, rolling up lots of straps and stashing them under the ladders, bolting the whole thing down. All very fun stuff. 🙂 The slightly more interesting activity was framing the windows. I wanted to make the window bucks a…Continue Reading “Chopping up some timber…” →

….get off my lawn!