Wall section 3 completed and section 4 ready for rendering

First of all, sorry we're a couple of days late with what we are now trying to make weekly updates. But the last week or so has been good in respect of building progress. Not only have we finished rendering section 2 of the walls on the outside and inside, we have also finished section 3 (the second bathroom) with render on both side and section 4 (the north wall up to the living room) is now ready to be rendered.

But on thing at the time. With the second stage we finished the outside rendering in two days and once that was done Geir started building the next strawbale wall and Jodie started rendering on the inside of section two. The walls are therefore a bit lighter in colour now, but of course still need another two layers of render to be finished. We are waiting with the inside until the plaster boards are up, but might to a second layer of render on the outside once all the strawbale walls are up. The current status on the inside looks like this:

As can be seen from the picture we have also rendered the area above the ceiling joists. This area will only have one layer of render which makes the second and third layers a bit easier on the inside.

The walls of bathroom to the east of the house went up pretty quickly. The baling work was almost completed in a day and with the second day the chicken wiring was also done. On the third day Geir then rendered the outside, and by this time Jodie had also finished rendering the second section on the inside. This did take a bit longer than other walls, mainly due to the top section where Jodie had to sit on top of the ceiling joists to render on the top part of the bales. Not too much space available, so the job was a bit cramped.

Eastern wall completed with one coat of render

Bathroom northern wall completed with one coat of render

Bathroom seen from the inside

Shower in the second bathroom. The bale wall has been rendered with one coat. On the stud wall we will then fix a cement sheet which will be tiled. This gives a 90mm room between the strawbales and the actual shower wall which will help against moisture coming into the strawbales. In order not to make the shower smaller, we cut the width of the bales down to 350mm instead of the normal 450mm.

After finishing the outside render, Geir then started working on the next wall section whilst Jodie started rendering the inside of the bathroom. We had hoped that the next section would go pretty fast due to all the windows on the northern wall, but it has taken us a bit longer than initially thought due to a lot of work on the sides and top of the windows. But after 3 days of work it is now ready for rendering.

Northern wall - the two double windows are for the two bedrooms.

Living room windows. We might have mentioned this before, but we are using the glass from our second hand windows in this section (as well as the one for the dining area), but in order not to have too much wood, we build a new frame to put the glass into.

Again living room window and then the door opening on the right will be into the dining area. We will start building this next section of walls tomorrow.

Northern wall seen from the inside, with the living room window and wall towards the dining room (on the left hand side). There will be a brick wall between the living room and the two bedrooms (at the back of the picture) and this will be built once all the walls are up.

Living room windows seen from the inside.

That's all the building news since last week. However, we do have some more animal news. We might have mentioned before that we were quite sure we now have a possum living in the area. We had seen it a couple of times before and found lots of "visiting cards" around the place. Indeed Jodie almost stepped on him when going out to the toilet the other night as he was sitting on the veranda outside our kitchen/living room in the cabins. A couple of nights later we again heard a lot of noise from outside our bedroom. Geir woke up and saw something moving on the cross bar above the veranda. A minute later he had found the camera and walked outside. So we now have proper evidence of our nightly visitor.

A Common Brush Tail possum. The shiny eyes are due to the flash, but we're sure you have guessed that already!

For those of you not familiar with possums you can read some things about them here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Possum

And finally, the weather has been really good lately, but a bit hot today with around 30 degrees. Should get about the same tomorrow, with a possible thunder storm in the afternoon! But the nice weather has also given some nice light clouds over the place:

OK, that is it for now.

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