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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!

Day 1 Righto, time to levitate some of the panels currently taking up my entire house slab, and put them somewhere useful. Lined up a lift, an extra-tall ladder and a bunch of friends & family, and we set to work on Saturday morning. My sparkie turned up for the day as well – partly to make sure we didn’t mess up any wiring, but also just to see a panel roof get put together. First cab off the rank was the three weird-shaped panels…Continue Reading “House Roof, Part 1” →

Meanwhile, my shed windows arrived! The frames and glass units came separately, which I wasn’t expecting and complicated picking it all up, but turned out to be a good thing since each frame weighed about 25kg, and the glass another 20kg. Installation turned out to be quite easy – put each frame in place and wedged it, run expanding foam around the gap, wait for it to dry and…voila. The glass went in quite easily, once we worked out how to get the beads off…Continue Reading “Windows” →

The last main bit of the house frame was the steel post in the corner of the living room windows, and the steel beams to support the windows. This hit a small snag when I checked one of the brackets my fabricators put together: So had to scoot up to their factory and get them to fix them up post-haste. 🙂 The ever-present hoist came out to help position the post which, unsurprisingly, was a tad heavier than the other timber ones, and had to…Continue Reading “House frame – steelwork” →