Happy Birthday Fuzzy Pumpkin

Karim had a few days off work for his birthday, and we went to a three course dinner and debate on “Eating Wild Mushrooms… Fun or Foolhardy?”, which was a fantastic night out. After being disengaged from the house build to date, he also got a real thrill out of spending a day helping Jack erect some of the rafters.

Progress slowed down somewhat this month, partly due to several rainy days, and Jolly being away for a couple of weeks.  Even still, the roof sheets have been installed over the dining room, and the rest of the roof framing should be completed within the next week or two, so we’ll have a roof over the whole house by the end of May.

I’ve been drowning in paperwork and decision making duties of late. The build has been happening so quickly that it’s been difficult to keep up with it, so the rainy days and mental support from our furry feline friends have actually been very welcomed.

A huge task recently has been the electrical plan, because wiring needs to be installed in the ceiling soon. I’m not a technically minded person at the best of times, so becoming coherent in sparky lingo and understanding the various lighting, home theatre, home networking and switching components, let alone how they can be installed in a straw bale house, has given me quite a pain in the brain. Though if you look at our current cabling situation, you can see why I’m taking it so seriously… this kind of image is totally banned from our new home and I’ll go to whatever lengths necessary to prevent it!

  

Having an Architect background, and great taste, Bree has been a fantastic shoulder to lean on during the decision making process. She suggested that we create a “display board” with samples of the materials we plan to use on the walls, floors, ceilings and trims. This has been invaluable, and will really help us choose our timber claddings, colour of window frames etc. We want to use pure earth render internally, and desire light coloured walls, but our clay is quite red. So I’ve been investigating methods to achieve light coloured earth render, stumbled across white Kaolin clay, and was flabbergasted to find that a Kaolin clay mine operated only about 10km south of us, and closed down in 1945. We’ve since found where it is, and can drive straight in with a trailer – brilliant! Here’s a test board of render using the Kaolin clay, with some of the local timbers and window frame colour that we’re considering.

We even went on a mission to the other side of Hobart to try and find lighter coloured sand (because the brown sand darkens the render when mixed with the white clay), and stumbled across sand heaven… it was just like being in Egypt all over again, exactly one year later!

Before returning to that dreaded paperwork, I thought I’d share just a couple of photos of the garden. It really is hard to believe that the fence only went up and the first seedlings were planted a mere 21 months ago. You really do have to love the permaculture principle of “Accelerating Succession and Evolution”.

We Have a Front Door!

We’re absolutely thrilled to have taught another Introduction to Permaculture Course this weekend, for “Source” at the Sandy Bay University Campus. This takes the number of students we’ve taken through a weekend course to over 50 since we moved to Tassie, it’s very exciting to see so many people keen to learn about and practise permaculture. And of course we met yet another great group of people in the process. The students always get a laugh out of this outdoor exercise where we ask them to take on the role of being chooks and vegetables etc.

Tim and Bree, the wwoofers who did an amazing garden blitz with us in January, have been staying on permaculture properties around Australia for the past six months looking for the perfect community to plant their roots (literally). We were ecstatic to hear that they chose the Huon Valley, as they will be a huge asset to the community we are proud to be a part of. They’re staying with us now while they make an offer on land, and have yet again done an astonishing amount of work to get the garden looking amazing for an open day that’s being held next weekend for the course students and the Huon Valley Gardening Club.

They also planted out the rock wall behind the house with all the succulents that we potted up a few months ago, as well as made mosaics with smaller rocks to fill in other large gaps in the wall, which will prevent weeds and grasses from emerging.

The wall looks amazing, so we can enjoy the view of the river during the day, and the view of the wall with solar up-lights at night will remind us of our trip to Egypt. The dining room wall to the north was designed with two large windows to let winter sun into the home, but since seeing how stunning the rock wall looks, we’ve decided to make it one huge window… which really seems to draw the rock wall into the house.

There was no rest for the wicked after we reached the milestone of building and raising the curved clerestory, as the following Monday the guys started constructing the curved wall around the lounge room.

The wall was framed within a week, and we could now see the view from the kitchen countertop through the five lounge room windows. Considering that Anna and I stood on milk crates on a rocky slope to survey those windows, we did a pretty good job!

By the second week of March the dining room wall was also framed, and all the rafters were on the curved roof.

And we had a front door!

Before you could blink an eye, or so it seemed, the back bedrooms started taking shape.

And by the end of March, which was all a bit of a blur to be honest, a truck was backing down the driveway with roof sheets for the clerestory!

There was definitely something special about watching the insulated roof blanket and roofing sheets being installed, as it reminded us that we are actually building a house.

Now that the clerestory roof is on, the view of the sky and forest through the windows has become clearer, as has the amount of sun and light that will enter the home.

And here is what the house looks like now.

We realised that the centre of the lounge room is exactly where we sat around a camp fire with Dean to celebrate NYE two years ago, without as much as a toilet or running water. The house build is going so well that there’s no doubt the ground it sits on, and we, were blessed that night…

The Curved Clerestory

The plan was always to build the curved clerestory in four large sections on the concrete slab (because it was the only level ground we had to build it on), then raise it in the air so it was out of the way and we could continue with the rest of the build. This meant erecting all the columns and beams that support it.

Some of those columns were local Celery Top Pine, which required endless days of preparation such as debarking with a hammer and chisel, angle grinding and sanding.

Which can have quite an effect on the mental health of even a strong man like Ben…

Our trusted excavator operator, Bob, then helped us raise the poles into position.

Ben used his magical welding skills to cut the steel columns and weld all the cleats into position, meaning that we could raise the steel members at the same time.

Once the Celery Top poles were in position, John did a final touch up with the sander.

Carly and I applied two coats of madison oil.

So bush poles that started off like this…

Are now works of art.

Until Ben nearly caught them on fire!

While all this was going on, our retired friend Jack (who runs a Model Shipyard in the local village and built the clerestory model for us) was building the curved top and bottom plates for the clerestory wall in his workshop down the road. It was a real joy for him to construct the real thing after building the model, which has sparked a new passion for sacred geometry.

At this point we could only hope that a) Jack was building the top and bottom plates to the correct proportions and radii, b) we had erected the columns and beams in the precise locations to support it, and c) the damn thing would fit. So Karim and I marked the location of every column and beam and the curves of the clerestory on the slab, including the centre points and each point of the spiral where the radius changed.

When Ben delivered the plates to site we were thrilled to see that Jack had also marked all the changes in radius on the plates, meaning he had paid very careful attention to detail.

And we all rejoiced when the plates fit inside the lines perfectly.

Even still, Jack tried to stop us from looking when making crucial cuts that meant “no turning back”.

Hurdle one was over, we knew the curved plates had been constructed to the exact proportions. But we couldn’t risk going ahead and constructing the whole clerestory wall only to find that the columns and beams weren’t in the right place. To confirm that, we had no choice but to lift the bottom plate into position, then take it down again. After many moments of scratching our heads trying to figure out how on earth to go about building this thing...

It fit!!!

During the process our designer, Graham, talked us into building the entire clerestory in one piece on the ground (rather than in four sections), then lifting it with a crane. As daunting as that sounded, it made a lot of sense considering that every stud, piece of wall, window opening and rafter was different because of the curves, which would take a lot of time trying to measure and construct once it was in the air. The studs were constructed first and we could start to see what the clerestory was going to look like. Here's the proud team, from top left to bottom right: John, Jack A, Jolly, Jack B, Karim, Penny and Ben.

Then the wall bracing was installed.

One week later all the rafters were on, it was primed, the crane was here and it was all hands on deck. Nervous owner builders positioned themselves on the viewing platform.

Then up she went!

A bit too close to the rock wall, yikes!

The audience were holding their breathe as it swung around in the air...

Then cheered as the wall spun around and a little (ok large) message of love was revealed.

At the end of the last blog update we said it would be truly wonderful if the clerestory wall was in the air by the end of February, and here it is...

Thanks to this awesome team, passionate designer, group of great friends and some extra girl power.

And you’ll be glad to hear that the garden is not suffering through lack of TLC, it is truly thriving. In addition to eating loads of fresh organic food, Carly has already stocked the shelves with preserves.