Roofing materials on the ground

There are not a lot of visual changes since last time, but we have been working.....!  We ordered the roofing materials on Wednesday and they arrived on Friday afternoon, that is, most of it arrived. Some or the really long roof sheets will come on Monday sometime as they needed to do two trips with the truck in order to get it all here. Overall we have ordered 305m2 of colourbond, so hopefully this will help us collect lots more water when it is raining (after the down pipes are installed that is).

Whilst waiting for the roofing materials we have put up most of the sub frames for our windows. For those who helped us pack the container in Norway you know very well that we brought second hand windows with us. Having now received the cost of two windows we will have to buy new, we are very happy you all helped us back them safely in the container. This has saved us around AUD 15000, which is very nice indeed!!!

The windows will be placed at the outer edge of the strawbale walls. There are many techniques used for this, but we have elected to go for a method where we make a sub frame from wood (using 140mm x 45mm hardwood) which the actual window frame is later inserted into. This lets us stack the strawbales up to the sides of the windows and also gives us something to fasten the wire to. The chicken wire will then later be attached to the sub frame, and the window put in its final place, before we start doing the rendering of the strawbales. We will post some more detailed pictures of this once it happens.

For the doorways we are using the same principle, but there we also have an additional stud of 90mm x 45mm on the inside of the sub frame which will be used to fasten the door jambs. This gives a solid anchorage for the door hinges and the locking mechanism (we hope).

Yesterday we started putting up some of the gutters as this is the first thing to do when doing roofing. We managed to put up the brackets for all the gutters, but only 4 sections of gutters before it just got to windy. Today has not been a good weather day - we have had lots of wind, rain, hail, sun, rain, hail, wind, sun again, etc. So, instead of working outside we have had a lazy day reading inside. Good to have a Sunday off.

So, the latest pictures:

Subframe of bedroom window

Fascia board with brackets for the gutter

The two bedrooms on the north/east side of the house, with window subframes. See also the gutter installed on top.

Another new development is that we have experimented a little with our digital camera and MS moviemaker. The result is a little visual update in moving pictures. This has been uploaded to youtube and can be found there. The quality is not at all good, the editing is terrible, but it gives a small indication of where we are. If it all works, we might try some more like this also in the future. A useful link should be:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=if0IcTy-6jc

Or if everything works OK, you should also be able to watch it here:

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