Finally some updates

Another long break between updates, but some good reasons: first of all, we had an almost 3 week long break from building at Christmas time. We travelled up to NSW, spent a week on the coast at Numbacca Heads and just over a week up at Guyra with Jodie's family. Then we had new year's eve with friends in Newcastle, before heading back to Hobart at the beginning of January.

After a big cleanup around the house and not at least in the garage and garden we could again start doing some building work. Having done some work on the house and getting closer to the time for the next building update our computer suddenly crashed. We tried and tried to get the hard disk back on line, but it had just died. So, then we had to get another one, re-install all the software and all the files from our backup CDs. Luckily we did not loose too much data, just the emails we received over the Christmas break, the pictures we took at Christmas (including some really nice birds and koalas in Newcastle) and some other files that somehow had not been backed up.

Anyway, we are back again now and will try to keep the diary going at least until we move into the house, if not a bit longer. Moving in date has now been set, that is, we now have a real deadline in that our respective parents are coming to visit at Easter time. Thus, we have to be in the house before the 19th of March, which gives us another 6 weeks or so to complete most of the work. Will it all be done? Probably not, but at least we should be able to live in it by then.

At the moment, the major jobs left are painting the straw bale walls on the inside (more about this later), finalising the tiling of bathrooms, the kitchen, entry and a bit in the hallway, laying all the floorboards, pouring the kitchen bench top and polishing this, and finalising the kitchen drawers (may or may not be done in time, but at least we will have the pantry!).

So what has happened during the last month. Well, Jodie has spent a considerable amount of time cleaning off render from all our windows and doors. Additionally she has sanded back the doors and re-oiled them after we put sikaflex in the joints, rather then the putty originally used. It turned out that the putty was not up to the job, so we have cleaned out all the joints between the timber and used sikaflex (black) to seal it all up again. Then they were sanded back and re-oiled and have come out very nicely indeed.

As for the windows we have found out the hard way that it is most certainly best to remove all the render splats immediately. When we did the rendering we tried wiping it off after a couple of days and it went off quite easily. As such we got lazy and did not do it, but in the meantime the render hardened and it turned out to be quite a job to get it all off. A bit of acid was used to try to soften it up, but it still took a long time to get it nice again. Another lesson learned before we do more rendering!

We have also painted all the timber ceilings with a watered down white paint, which means we can still see the structure of the wood, but it is not as dark as it otherwise would be:

This is the living room after painting the ceiling and re-oiling the beams

And here is the bedroom ceiling

We have also finished painting all the plasterboard walls, except for the kitchen and one of the bedrooms (currently used as a store room!).

Now, we should mentioned a bit more about the colour for the rendered walls. We probably have mentioned before that we initially were going to do a sand/lime/white cement mix for the last coat in order not to need an oxide or painting. Well, we just could not manage to get the right mix and thus we decided on rendering the third coat with our normal mix and then to put something on it later. The idea then was to use a mix of white cement, an oxide and water to get a kind of a cement paint that we could brush on the walls. This kind of worked but did not give us the colour we wanted - yet again. Finally we have done some more research into paints and have now decided to go with Dulux EnvirO2 paint which has virtually no VOCs (Volatile Organic Compounds). We have decided to go with the same shade of white as on the other walls, and then add colour to the house through the floor boards, our nice Afghan carpets, pictures, etc. That said, the rendered brick wall between the living room and the bedroom will be dark red !

In respect of our kitchen and laundry benchtops we have also finsihed the framing of these so that it is ready for the pouring of concrete. We are now just waiting for some diamond pads in the post before we get the concreter in to help us create a nice finish. The framing so far looks as follows:

Laundry bench top - 1

Laundry bench top - 2

And the kitchen like this:

The breakfast bar:

Place for the sink.

This is where we will have a bucket for the compost.

The kitchen, as seen from the pantry, looking towards the dining room.

The bench between the dining room and the kitchen

And finally with some water proofing - part 1

And finally with some water proofing - part 2

Finally, it should also be mentioned (but the picture sadly got lost) that we harvested a zucchini that weighed 1.5 kg when we got back from the holidays. The even more amazing gardening news is that our friends who looked after the garden when we were away had harvested 2 even bigger ones just a week before. We still have a steady supply of zucchinis, lettuce, silver beat and the tomatoes are starting to get ready. The raspberry season is all but over, but will hopefully be better next year. 

For some more updates on what we have done lately, see the next to diary entries.

Cheers.

Any problems, please email webmaster. This page was last updated 24/07/2008