Ceiling joists and veranda

Over the last week we have completed some of the remaining parts of the roof, i.e. putting up  some of the flashings - again with help from Mike - but the rest of the days have been used for carpentry work. We had not done the ceiling joists over the kitchen, dining area and office, but these have now been completed. Well, we have actually made a bit of a change in respect of the dining area. Originally we were to have a flat ceiling here, but as Geir managed to order the wrong size of beams for the ceiling joists, we decided to use the opportunity to make a small change. As such, we will now have a raked ceiling in the dining section, that is, it will be around 3.5 meters high on the west side and about 2.5 meters high on the east side. This will be similar to what we have in the living area and in the music/movie room, and we are hoping it will fit in ok.

To illustrate:

Ceiling joists over the kitchen area. Then at the top of the picture it is possible to see how the roof will be over the dining section.

Shows the ceiling joists from inside the "loft-space"

And the finally, the ceiling joist over the office

We have also started putting up the posts for the veranda. The reason for doing this now is that one end of the rafters is supported by a ledger inside the strawbale wall. As such, we have to have the wood work completed before starting the strawbaling. The covered section of the veranda will be around 1.8 meters wide, but we are likely to extend the decking of the veranda further out, but this might have to wait until later some time (when we have money for the materials!)

Southern end of the veranda.

Northern end of the veranda

Northern end seen from the side.

In terms of carpentry work, we now generally only have the windows in the dining room and the living room left before we can start the strawbale work (well, that is after the veranda is finished). We are hoping to have everything ready before we head off to Sydney and Northern NSW end of November/early December, so that we can start working with strawbales when we get back.

On the 14th of October (diary entry no 60) we wrote about a hot and windy October. Well, since then we have had a couple of bad frost nights and stone fruit farmers are reporting that they have lost about half of their crops. It is really bad, and it is still really, really dry here. We have had some rain, but far from enough. Then yesterday morning we woke up at around 6 in the morning due to thunder and lightning. At 6.30 Geir walked down and picked up the paper, and on the way up the driveway, the hail started coming down. There were places on the east coast of Tasmania that received snow for the first time in 30 years, and we had snow on the mountain most of yesterday (but now it is gone!). So our property looked like this for a few hours:

Today we have been collecting tyres from some people not living too far away. After having planted a few hundred threes and using stakes and bags to protect them, we have concluded that the work is much easier using tyres, and it also seems that the trees inside the tyres are very happy. So today we got around 450-500 tyres which we will use when planting lots of trees along the lagoon at autumn time. Not the greatest job moving them today, but it will save a lot of time during planting time.

Have a nice week !!

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