let me clarify this right away: when i say rough start i mean the circumstances could have been better. mostly, we could have done without that rain we were having. we started on tuesday, and then the friendly folks from the weather bureau forecast rain practically coming in vertically for wednesday. it wasn’t quite as…
yeah, bad pun, but there you go: we have finally started. the hemp is being turned into walls, slowly but surely. hemp hurd, lime, water, sand and binder all mixed together and then carefully tamped between two sheets for formwork 300 mm apart. we were inducted into the secret society of hemp brewers by the…
look at that, it almost feels like a house. it has recently seen the addition of key features all houses need (the serious ones anyway): a roof and windows. sounds easy enough, but in this day & age of supply-side shortages getting either on time is not a given. what is a given, however, is…
we don’t really enjoy this. we’d much rather just see the plants grow in whatever way it works best. the problem is that someone in the past has decided to upset the balance using heavy machinery, and now we’re stuck with all this semi-decomposed timber. if you look closely between sec 19 and 27 you…
after a few days of pretty strong winds it was a quiet day today, and i was able to end the drone up for a little look. a few things have changed, and it’s great to see it starting to come together. for one the roof structure is almost complete, and the roof can now…
dry creek bed. that’s what we’re building. clear as mud? ok, let me explain. the idea of a dry creek bed is that it is generally dry, as whatever water may collect in it runs off, down the river (bed). and if there is no water getting into it, it’s just looking pretty, like a…
it has been a while since we’ve flown the drone. there wasn’t really all that much to look at from above. however, the building is making really good and above all visible progress now, but we’ve found that capturing this can be a challenge from ground level. did you notice that quite a few photos…
seriously, if people are still looking for an answer to that question the world is in a lot of trouble than we realise. in our view that is at least part of the issue: waiting for others to do something before we get our own act together may seem like a rational course of action…
i guess we are. the house feels a bit like a colouring-in book: there are all these lines and now what we have to do is fill in the bits. how hard can it be? and how long can it take? i guess the correct answers are: ‘not too hard but probably harder than it…
this, we are told, is when things really accelerate. from nothing (ie a rather complicated concrete slab) suddenly the outline of a house appears, the skeleton of a roof emerges, and it feels like one could move in the following week. we have been warmed that progress will slow considerably at this point, and the…
two wood fireplaces (and the required flue kits). two washing machines. two induction cooktops. one fridge. one microwave / convection oven. those are not all the appliances we need for our new house, but it is all we were able to pick up this week, and frankly, it was all we could get on the…