Ready for rendering

A big step forward, in that we are now ready to start the next phase of our building, well, at least of the workshop/garage building. Today we finished off the work installing fibre cement sheets under the eves, and we are now ready to start the mixing of sand, lime, cement and water to get render onto the walls. We have no idea how long it will take us, nor how hard it will be, but at least it is good to know that we have finished with all the chicken wire work for the moment (not entirely true in that we have just a little bit left inside, but at least the outside is done).

Installing the fibre cement sheets went quite easily. Normally, there should be a groove in the facia board that the cement sheet slots into, but we had plain boards and therefore had to screw on pieces of wood underneath the fibre cement sheet in order to hold it up. The inner side of the sheet is tucked between the strawbales and the rafters/outriggers, thus did not need to be fastened.

We have, though, decided that we will do it slightly differently when it comes to the house, mainly as a lot of our bales were either a bit to high, or a bit to uneven. As such, we had to cut most of the sheets to the shape of the bales, giving us a bit more work. It really showed us how some of our walles are far from straight, but we think that will give a nice look.

For the house we will probably put a piece of wood between the rafters/outriggers before doing the strawbales and the chicken wire work. We can then tuck the wire over and around this piece of wood, and later use this as the inner support for the cement sheets. This should hopefully let us have a straight line, and as we can put this up before the bales, we can also put it at a standard size of cement sheets (probably 600mm). This should reduce the need for cutting and making the whole job a bit easier.

So, ready for rendering, the garage/workshop looks like this:

Workshop Entrance	Top of workshop entrance, including door jambs and cement sheets
Switchboard made accessible from the outside	Fibre cement sheets used under eves.

So, hopefully in a week or two, there will be some more pictures of rendered walls!!!

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