Prepping for baling, and swearing at my architects…

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…”

Roofing weekend

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”

In order to get my driveway back, I needed to move all these ridiculously long panels down to the house. Since the shorter ones were ~10m (and therefore 100kg), and the longer ones 11.5m (115kg!) I needed something more intelligent than just “get more people and make them hate me by lifting heavy things.” Cue the development of Paul’s Patended Panel Perambulator: With the help of a set of wheels and an axle from Bunnings and various bits of timber from my stash, I threw…Continue Reading “Panel moving…”

Roof lifting day, from the air

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.

Diggy diggy hole

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”

Chopping up some timber…

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…”