Hot and cold running water

This entry is a few days late compared with the title. We  had now had hot and cold running water for about a week or ten days. The plumber came again and finalised the work for the guest cabin (guess we have to stop calling them cabins as we now have one roof over it all and also doors from each room into the bathroom (see pictures below)). But since we don't yet had a bathroom we still have outside washes, but at least we can now just place the bucket under the tap, rather then boiling the water and getting it in buckets from the tanks.

Then installation is relatively simple: the two tanks are now joined together and connected to the pump. The pump is connected to the guesthouse (and ready to be connected to the main house), where the pipes run under the bathroom floor into the kitchen. A gas unit has been installed on the back wall of the guesthouse (see picture) on a wooden frame that will be hidden inside the straw bale walls. This saves from having to worry about the render cracking in the future when we have the unit hanging on the wall. As you can see from the same picture, we have also used colourbond on the wall for the bathroom. We had leftover materials from the roof and decided to use this to see how it would look. If we are happy with the final look after the rendering, we might use colourbond on the walls of the main house as well, where we won't be using straw bales. At least it is durable, no maintenance, and it also gives it a kind of a beach look, though we are not right on the beach......

The door in the picture was made form leftover cabin building materials, and the window was picked up for free at a house renovation in Oslo (we have another 130 something windows like it in the container that might one day be used for a greenhouse).

We had even more colourbond leftover, well, actually some off cuts that couldn't really be used anywhere else, so we have built a pump house to fit into the current pine look of the cabins. This was also built from leftover materials from the cabins (there was actually quite a lot of materials left when we were finished, partly as we are "redesigning" the normal use, and partly as we changed the roof beams from pine to hardwood). The little pumphouse looks like this:

The extension cord that comes down into the pump house will of course disappear once we have the electricity properly installed!

Inside the bathroom we have now also finished the doors from the two cabins into the bathroom. It is quite a nice change to be able to walk from one room to the other without having to walk outside (especially when it is raining!). The doors were cut out from the original wall, and studs were placed on each side of the door to support the walls to make sure they continued to stay streight. These studs are screwed into every second board and the holes will be plugged so that the screws cannot be seen. We also placed a lintel above to make it look nicer. A door frame was then made using Tas Oak 90 x 17mm wood. The cut out pine wood from the walls were then shortened and put together as a door by nailing on Tas Oak 70 x 17mm on the sides. The door knobs were picked up from the tip shop for AUD 2 each, and overall the doors then probably cost us around AUD 15 each with the wood, nails and door knobs (+ a bit of work, but that was actually quite fun to do!).

Bedroom to Bathroom door	Living room to bathroom door

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