Eve lining and colourbond walls

Back from a 10 day or so break, for a wedding in Sydney and a Christening in Northern New South Wales, we have now started doing some building work again.

As we mentioned in the last entry, now some time ago, we had started putting up the cement sheets for the eve lining already before we headed off to the north island. It took us an afternoon and the next morning to finish off the rest of the eves and we are therefore finished with the necessary work before we can start doing the major work of putting in the straw bales. We have probably mentioned before that this is a change from how we did the garage/workshop, where we put up the cement sheet after we did the straw bale work, and we are fairly sure that this will be a much better method. At least it was much easier to put up the cement sheets this time, especially after having made a groove in the fascia board to insert the cements into. We have already put the aviary wire in place and will then use full bales as far up as possible, and then stuff straw inside the aviary wire in order to make it nice and tight.

The eve lining, which will eventually be painted, currently looks like this:

Outside dining room

Outside bedrooms and living room

Outside read/play area and laundry

We then decided that it would be best to put up the colourbond walls before we started the straw bale work. It wasn't crucial that we did this work now, but as we were both at the site in the last couple of days, and that it will help stop the wind blowing through the house, we thought we might as well get it done.  For the house, there are 3 sections of walls were we will not be using straw bales. This is at the front entrance, at the main bedroom and en-suite bathroom and the wall of the second bathroom. One of the reasons for this is the space that would be taken up by the straw bale wall and another is the fact that the plans originally were made with compost toilets in mind, using a pit under the toilet floor for the compost bin. It would have been very hard to have a heavy strawbale wall over the pit, thus using a normal stud wall. There were many options in terms of the cladding we could have used, but we decided on the colourbond, partly due to the look (we tested it out on the little cabins first), but also as it should be low maintenance.

We have now put up the sheets for the 3 wall sections. We still have to do 4 wall sections up on the roof (the front and sides of the clerestory roof section, and the side section over the entrance area) and if the weather is good tomorrow, that might be the next task. We have so far just put up the sheets and only in a couple of places cut out the holes for the windows. As such, it looks a bit strange for the moment, but it will all come better by the end of it. We probably won't cut out the window holes until we have the windows ready, just to help stop the wind blowing through.

For now, this is the status:

Section into en-suite bathroom (left) and bedroom (right). The doorway will be made a bit higher and there will be two windows in the en-suite section, one for the toilet and one for the shower (glass bricks)

Entry way - doorway will be slightly higher and the window will be bigger. Then there will be a straw bale wall to the right of the window where the besser blocks can be seen on top of the slab.

Second bathroom wall. Again, one window will be added later.

Second toilet wall from the inside. Sisolation is used both as a vapour barrier and as part of the insulation. The cavities will later be filled with R2.0 insulation bats. The back of the colourbond can be seen where the window will be and the pipe in the wall is for the toilet.

So, that is were we are at the moment. If everything works out we hope that we will have some straw bale pictures for you by next weekend !!!

And finally, here is a new little slideshow, this time of the garage and workshop construction:

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