Category: Uncategorized

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” →

The plumbers descended on the block today, for the first time since….I think it was when they did the sewer run down around the back of the house, which was a while ago. It’s changed a bit since then. I had a few jobs for them today, which they thought might take them more than a day: install the shed toilet & sink hook up the meter to the main supply pipe run all of the internal plumbing in the house walls, in aid of…Continue Reading “Internal plumbing” →

I’ve also been chipping away at the inside 2nd coat – keeping on with my 5-6 mixer loads/day and getting some other stuff done along the way. The dog has been doing an excellent job of supervision: ….but not otherwise contributing much. Did this wall over a couple of sessions, because the window reveals are tedious as heck. This funny 105° corner (the “Architect’s Folly”) was interesting as well – I needed to build it out a LOT, because baling a 105° corner is almost…Continue Reading “Rendering: 2nd coat, inside” →

Been installing windows, with a mate for extra hands and good ideas, over the last couple of weekends. It’s a surprisingly fiddly process – lots of checking levels, verticals and straightness in lots of different directions, and mucking about with shims to keep everything straight: Drill and countersink holes in the frame for screws Put window in wall (this is where you really need the extra person, to hold it up while you muck around) and get it straight and upright Screw lowest screw in…Continue Reading “Windows!” →

With the shed(s) dealt with and the ATU online, next on the list was a whole pile of rendering (yay!) before I put the windows in the house. Realistically I can do the windows at any point, but I figured it’d be easier if I got rid of a lot of rendering first – both because it means less mess to clean off the windows afterwards and it’s easier to get barrows of render inside the house if there isn’t pesky things like doors in…Continue Reading “Rendering: House, outside, second coat” →

In the end it got done a day early – ATU guy dropped past yesterday to run the piping, since the weather today was garbage. Council guy then rang him to reschedule, and they ended up sorting the paperwork out that afternoon. In the end I got to keep both my ruins and my little tree behind the house: so I’m pretty happy with that. Now all I need is…..everything upstream of it. 🙂