The house wot Juffy built
It’s extremely wet in Perth. Thankfully the house’s first coat is almost complete, so I’ve been able to dispense with the plastic wrapping – probably a good thing, since the wind was starting to tear it all to shreds anyway. Seemed like a good excuse to do some inside work – we’ve now pretty much finished the internal meshing (at last!). We also cleared out all the recessed rooms of the house – the master and 2nd bedrooms, main bathroom and 2nd toilet – and…Continue Reading “Winter strikes”
A couple of days’ work to get the roof flashings up on the house. As part of the big update post a few weeks ago, I mentioned the fiddly ‘official’ method of doing the bottom bargeboards to comply with BAL requirements (using two pieces of metal – one with the visible profile, and another behind it cut out to fill the ridge holes in the roof skin). For the house I worked out a way to do it with one piece and achieve the same…Continue Reading “House roof flashings”
Some more fiddly bits – running some of the KNX wiring into the mounting plates (aka. a piece of the ubiquitous plywood) for light switches, and chasing the conduits into the bales. Just used the whipper snipper to chop out the channel up the face of the bales, then there’s another piece of conduit through the bales to the mounting plate.
A few more short rendering sessions – back onto the plasterer’s sand for sanity’s sake. Did a few days where I’d work on meshing the inside of the house (and doing other fiddly bits) in the morning, then fire up the mixer for 4-5 loads in the afternoon. This seemed to work pretty well – I could get some useful stuff done, knock off a bit of rendering and not end up exhausted. Day 1 Day 2 Day 3 This ended up being seven mixer…Continue Reading “Some more house rendering”
Rainy Sunday catching up on meshing the inside of the house with a couple of helpers, and ticking off a few random fiddly bits. The main fiddly bit was the weird corner of the ceiling where the two roof planes meet – an old photo from roof installation day: Now that I’ve got interesting things like walls I had a better idea of the context of this join, and decided (with the consensus of everyone) that it would look a lot better if I could…Continue Reading “Random bits of ceiling”
Got stuck back into the house rendering – I had a couple of days of decent weather before another storm came through, so I wanted to get the south wall protected. This wall cops a lot of water from rain coming off the roof and bouncing off the retaining wall on that side. I’ve had it covered in plastic for a fair while, but my plastic is all starting to degrade and I’d rather protect it with render. Had another friend foolishly express interest in…Continue Reading “House rendering”
Another couple of days’ worth of rendering, with some help from friends & family, and the second coat on the inside of the shed is almost complete.
More second-coat rendering on the shed over the long weekend, with one day devoted to helping my sister plant trees, just for something different. Starting to refine my technique a bit – the first day we mostly just added a layer of render, but I’m paying more attention to adding more in the low spots and less in the high spots, and there are plenty of both in the shed walls. I doubt I’ll get them to perfectly-flat, and I don’t think I want to,…Continue Reading “2nd coat, shed”
Started work on the second coat of render on the shed, just for something completely different. One of my critical paths (other than “finish the damn house”) is to get the shed in a usable state. The sequence goes something like Finish* rendering the shed (* – kinda) Retrieve my sea container and all of my woodworking gear to help make the interior of the house Pull everything worth saving out of the old shed Dismantle the old shed Use the old shed’s area as…Continue Reading “Different rendering!”
Oops – I thought it had been 2-3 weeks since I’d posted, but it’s actually more like 6 weeks. Apologies to my legions of fans! I haven’t been idle, just doing a lot of boring fiddly stuff that doesn’t make for compelling content. Meshing Meshing, meshing and so much more meshing. I didn’t appreciate how easy the shed was with its lack of windows and doors. Extra bits of random framing, over doors etc: Big rolls of narrow strips of mesh: I made these rolls…Continue Reading “Omnibus update :)”