Month: December 2021

A couple of brutally hot days post-Christmas, with one spent cladding the plant room and pantry (with plasterboard, because these rooms are either not-required-to-be-pretty (plant room) or liberally-covered-in-cupboards (pantry), both of which lend themselves to getting the job done fast rather than mucking about with straw walls. Quite hard to get photos of the pantry, since it’s a small L-shaped room: and after another day of stuffing we had the kitchen wall and bathroom/hallway walls prepped: This kitchen wall was another hybrid mesh/villaboard wall, to…Continue Reading “More internal walls” →

Rather warm day getting the dog fence started, to keep the muppet where he should be. I’d acquired a bunch of 2nd-hand pool fencing from a local freecycling group, and bought a bundle of pine logs, and spent a rough day with a post-holer getting everything in place and concreted. The pool fencing actually turned out to be almost perfect – worked around from the neighbour’s building on the boundary to the shed’s lower retaining wall, and it all fitted in very nicely around the…Continue Reading “Dog fencing” →

Put together the plant room doors, just to get the hole closed up. These aren’t pretty by any means – timber frame, cement sheet cladding: ….but they’re solid enough and will get the job done. Also got some more internal wall-stuffing done, now that the plumbing and electrical is done. The 2nd bedroom is now closed up, and the laundry is basically done as well. I used a sheet of villaboard as the backing for the laundry area: to make it easier to mount cupboards…Continue Reading “And yet another door…” →

Had some extra hands today, with another potential builder offering some labour in return for picking my brain about things. We got rid of a bit of rendering, but the cement mixer decided to split its drive belt (get a spare drive belt before you need one, people!) so I took advantage of the bonus hands to install the front and laundry doors. The frames themselves were pretty simple, being more or less rectangular, but hanging the door sashes was quite entertaining. Figured it was…Continue Reading “Some more doors” →

The last job before I could close up and stuff the remainder of the internal walls was to install the solar panels – these were slated for the north-facing roof over the 2nd bedroom and study, and had to be cabled over to the switchboard on the south side of the house. I really want to avoid having any penetrations through the roof if I can (because penetrations always leak eventually) so I had a couple of complicated options for the installers to mull over….Continue Reading “Solar panel installation, take 1” →