Hello everybody!

As you can guess, it’s been a busy time with our little girl and our blog has been getting neglected.

Willow is now 4 months old (where did the time go?) and we are still in the shed with the house a long way off.  Never mind … we’re comfortable and Willow loves the shiny silver walls in the shed.

Our plans for the house are in with council but of course now we are thinking of changing them which will make the approval process take a lot longer.  The aim is to have a house by the time Willow is in Primary School.  It is a joke but could possibly become reality.

Rob has been working hard as usual, his business has really taken off, he’s a doting dad and somehow he still finds time to chop wood, mow and basically keep the place running.  Thanks Rob!!

So we’ve been planning to build a house for a while now, setting deadlines and breaking them before setting them again.

When we moved up here we wanted to soak ourselves in the environment, learn the seasons and use this knowledge to build a suitable home on the property.

Of course, it seems pretty simple to say “I’m going to build a house” when I have limited experience, but I’ve never had a huge amount of experience in anything that I’ve done before throwing myself into it. Learning fast and also from my mistakes before things turn ugly makes life interesting to say the least – but I’ve done a fair bit of research on housing and think that we are making all of the right compromises for us.

Some of the main features we have planned are:

• Orientation – having a north facing house so that winter sun enters the windows for warmth and the summer sun is blocked by eaves.
• Materials – using rendered straw bale infill walls with have huge insulation properties (an approximate “R” rating of 9).
• Using a slab for thermal mass and (combined with the walls) bushfire protection.
• Open plan living without internal walls downstairs.
• Outdoor living – we currently spend a lot of time outside and want to continue this with large decking and indoor/outdoor spaces. This means that some of the decking will be sheltered from the weather and used as a year round living area.

The plan is for a loft design with high pitched gable and the second floor in the roof space for better summer heat dissipation, better use of space, cost effectiveness and a unique cottage feel. The design also means that the house can be built by a minimum number of people and is something that Meg and I can accomplish together, with a little help from friends and the occasional tradie.

Last January’s deadline for submitting plans to council died a quiet death and the deadline was reborn mid-year.

Having a third wind a month or so again, I obtained the paperwork from the council and have started going through it. This means learning new terms, having to expand TLAs (Three Letter Acronyms) that are used everywhere and generally starting to manage the project.

So the check lists have started in earnest now. Meg has contacted the company that will do the soil testing and I’m contacting some earth movers for advice and vague costing.

It is a little strange that the project has costs associated with it that are dependent on the cost of the building, but the cost of the building is a variable thing. For example, materials costs may fluctuate, some parts of the build may use tradespeople or not. I think that the variability in this figure could be 50% of the cost of the build.

We’ll keep our eyes open for pitfalls, but expect that we’ll fall into a few anyway. But then isn’t that all part of the fun?

Plans for the house have been coming along well and Meg and I have been working hard on decisions for the house; what to build, where to build it, how am I going to be able to do it etc etc.

Raph came up to visit and as part of his Uni holidays, he spent a while on the spade and crowbar.

A couple of “lightening strikes” saw some trees fall over near the proposed house site, so we thought that we should get rid of the stumps.

How hard could it be? Surely we could just dig them out?

The Blue gums around here tend to grow with multiple trunks sprouting from a base and trimming the trunks down was easy enough. The plan was to dig around the base and hopefully under some roots before lighting a decent bonfire to burn the rest away.

This sounds great in theory, but the first fire that we lit went for three days…

The end of the first stump was the second burning and coincided with the first camp oven chook. After burning for a few hours, the monster chook (over 3Kg) was stuffed with lemons and onions, seasoned with pepper, salt, garlic and chilli and placed on a bed of lemon peel in the camp oven.

Raph dug a huge hole, about a foot and a half deep next to the fire for the camp oven. We backfilled with red hot coals from the base of the stump to about the halfway mark before putting the camp oven in and completely covering it over the handle – even though the handle was pointing straight up.

Three hours later, we hooked out the camp over and had the juiciest roast chicken with gravy and steamed veg picked from the garden.

With the first stump pretty much finished, Raph and I started on the second after a night of a neighbour’s great cleanskin Cab Savs. (Maybe a mistake?)

The blisters came thick and fast as we tackled the second stump and consumed what felt like our bodyweight in cool rainwater.

Pa came over in time to lend a hand and we dug up to a metre down around the stump. Not a bad effort for three hours on the spade.

The fire was big, but safe as the hole was surrounded with dirt, stopping the wind from blowing embers across the ground.

A heap of wood and days later the stump had taken a battering. Maybe one more burning and it will be gone.

It sometimes seems like we are taking small steps in the process of building the house, but each step gets us closer.

With considerable rainfall in the last month or two, it seems that we have had a good winter in the mid-North this year. If the look of our cars are anything to go by, you’d have to agree that we’ve had some decent rainfall.

July was above average, making up a little for a poor June, while August saw the average fall – around 81mm. See more at the BOM site. 

Living out of town with only dirt roads connecting us is enough to keep cars dirty, but the council have decided to run some full scale repairs on a large section of one of these roads and have been interrupted many times by heavy rainfall. Therefore the road is regularly a quagmire with six inch deep slosh to wade through. Sometimes I think I should wear a Captain’s hat as the Patrol steers like a boat!

I’m glad that Meg has a 4WD now as she’s had to use it a number of times just heading to and from work. It would have been touch and go in her old car. 

My car has seen even more of this, due to my work with farmers around the district. Some of the roads to the farms can be very waterlogged after heavy rain and I feel that I am justified in running a “proper” 4WD. Its funny watching clods of mud fly out the front of the vehicle, only to land back on the windscreen as you drive through them and I’m now used to keeping a finger on the wipers to wash away the muddy water that seems to jump out in front of me whenever there is a puddle about.

In talking with locals, it seems that this year is a return to Clare winters of old, where it rains regularly from June through to August. Some have been saying that we haven’t had a winter like this for ten years. 

The garden has definitely taken a turn for the better with longer days and sunshine triggering lush vegetation. We’re eating broccoli every day and have an occasional feed of potatoes, leeks, English spinach, spring onions, bok choi, radishes, parsley, coriander and Chinese cabbages. The broad beans are coming along, as are the peas and garlic.I’m busy planting as many spuds as I can to try and keep up with strong demand! Each meal I try to cut at least one eye from each spud and have been storing them in egg cartons until I get a moment to plant. Hopefully this will result in at least two plants to harvest all year around when things really get going and that will make us self sufficient in potatoes.  

One of the chores that has come back with the end of winter is mowing the weeds and grass around our living areas in preparation for snake season. I’ve mowed the last couple of weekends and the grass seems to be taking this as a challenge, jumping back out of the ground.

In tight spaces where the ride on mower has a bit of trouble, I mowed with the standard garden mower and collected a trailer load of clippings that went straight to the open compost area. The differed aspects of the garden are slowly taking shape, with the compost and soil creation area (dirt, manure, organic matter) at the top of the hill above the vegie garden as most of the ingredients are delivered by trailer and it is easier to carry things downhill with a wheelbarrow. The other advantage is that any nutrients that wash away will wash towards the vegie garden and not away from it.

There are always things to do, but I feel that the vegie garden is now supporting us to a fair degree and I get a great sense of accomplishment from that.

View the photo gallery for more pics.

After pumping water into the new tank, the next project on the list was the new shed. It is a bit embarrassing to talk about this storage area as a “shed” in a place where sheds usually span at least six metres and are composed of three or more, three metre bays but we had bought as big as we could without having to get council approval to build it.

So the “shed” was three metres by three metres and would do to house mowers and garden tools and get a heap of other stuff out of the way.

A trip into Clare to buy cement was an opportunity, as always, for Raph to get a pie and we loaded 16 bags of cement into the trailer from Mitre10.

With that amount of cement, we needed a heap of gravel. Consulting our new “How to make concrete” booklet, we worked out that we’d need at least two trailer loads of sand/gravel mix. Erring on the side of caution for a change, and with the quarry closed over the long weekend, Raph and I did three quick trailer loads before tackling the pre-pack shed.

It was a bit of a laugh how easy it was to zip the shed together. Even though the wind came up, the two of us managed to hold and fix walls together and then fit the roof. Thanks to Raph’s ingenious use of straw bales as a “third person” to support a wall, we were soon admiring out work.

Of course, our haste to build the shed saw us erect it next to where we wanted it to live, and the next morning with a bit of grunting and a little bending, Meg, Raph and I man-handled it into position to prepare for the concreting.

Being an opportunistic scavenger, I had leftover reinforcing from when the “real” shed was professionally concreted and this was enough to cover the floor with a little overlap outside. Using leftover pavers to lift the reo off of the ground and then the shed off of the reo gave us about 100mm for the concrete slab.

After Meg and I returned from the ANZAC Day dawn service in Clare, Raph and I set to work to mix the concrete with the resurrected mixer. I shovelled while Raph carted, spread and finished. We worked hard and fast with the threat of rain and in a couple of hours, the inside was finished.

Tired after the early start and hard labour we retired for afternoon as the rain spoiled any chance of further work and the goon started to flow.

24mm of rain fell on Friday arvo and through Saturday and it was Sunday afternoon before Meg and I set to work to concrete the outside apron around the shed. Of course, as soon as we finished more showers came in, but the overall result will be functional.

The last few days have seen both a flurry of activity and construction as well as some relaxing DVD time, listening to the rain on the shed roof.

Plans have been in place for a while to build some more storage and find a better way of using rain water.

We need storage since the shed that we live in is cluttered with tools and boxes. Other tools and machines are stored in the wood shed – taking up space where the firewood should be drying and there are assorted piles around the place that should be tidied up.

The other problem that we have discovered is regarding rain water.

A while after building the shed we bought a 2000 Gallon poly tank to catch the rain water. With the shed on a slope, the tank is lower than the level of the shed which means that the only real use of the rainwater is for drinking and cooking.

The problem came to us over summer, when we were happily drinking the water but noticing that the level in the tank wasn’t going down significantly. A nice problem to have, but what would happen when it rained? Rainwater running out of the water tank overflow and down the hill would be a crying shame.

The solution was to consider our water use. We pump bore water into a 5000 Gallon tank at the top of the hill and then gravity feed from there. This allows us to use the bore pump (2.2kW) for about two hours a month, rather than pumping every time we need water.

The bore water runs down the hill to the shed to be used for the shower, dishes and clothes washing, as well as a bucket or two for the small garden. The height of the tank over the shed and the use of one inch poly pipe for transfer means that we get about 20 litres per minute – enough pressure for any of our needs individually.

The Nature Loo toilet doesn’t use any water and the sink at the shed is used for washing hands.

We considered this and the luxury of excess rainwater (through our frugal usage) and decided to put another tank on top of the hill for rainwater and plumb an alternate pipe for use at the sink and shower. (The clothes seem to wash fine in bore water and Meg thinks that we will continue to use bore water when we build the “real” laundry for the house.)

The catchment will still be at the shed, but when the tank fills we will pump to the new tank at the top of the hill for later use. Having 5000 Gallons at the top of the hill should provide us with enough storage and if we monitor the use we should have enough for our new usage plan.

The other benefit is for when we build the house. We should already have rainwater in place and ready to incorporate into our house plumbing.

As well as plans for The Journey, Pa was talking about installing another 5000 Gallon tank at his place.

So with ideas expanding and combining with each other, Pa and I prepared sites with many trips to the Clare Quarry for crusher dust.

Pa’s site was dug out with a Bobcat due to time constraints and then levelled and three loads were put on top of the hill at our place for the tank and shed.

It all hinged on Raph coming up from Adelaide during the mid semester Uni break for another part of the “work for the Goon” scheme and I’d ordered tanks and a 3m x 3m garden shed to be ready when he was.

Wednesday was tank day. We’d picked Raph up from the bus on Tuesday night and we were ready for a big day of work.

After picking Pa up at his place, we headed to Cox Rural where we had the tanks ready for pickup. I’d been told that it wasn’t the done thing these days to tow the tank trailer with a 5000 Gallon tank, but they were OK with it and Pa and I had done it before. (Just think about a 3.7m diameter tank on its side on top of a trailer – this takes it to a bit under 5 metres tall!)

Despite a highly embarrassing although minor trailer incident where the trailer wasn’t correctly hitched, we were soon motoring very slowly down the back roads. With the height of the tank we had to be very careful to avoid the trees overhanging the road and zigzagging back and forth at 30km/h.

The tank came off of the trailer easily after the centre post was inserted and was easily slid into its final resting place with the help of the crusher dust.

With one tank done, we picked up the second and headed to Pa’s place to confront a problem. One of the trees looked a little low and despite my enthusiasm to get out the chainsaw, Pa thought we’d be able to ease through.

With a little encouragement, low range four wheel drive engaged and a little slipping and sliding, the tank gently pushed the trunk up and slid underneath! There were a few tense moments, but we were soon crawling gently up the rest of the steep driveway.

With a bit of reversing and some final digging to allow the trailer wheels to be almost level, the tank slid off into place perfectly.

We were happy. Two tanks were in place before lunch with only a one embarrassing moment and no failures. Job done.

After lunch we picked up the shed and plumbed the pump into the water tank at the shed before I had to go and see a client.

Not every day of work ends in so much getting done and it was good to look back at the results.

Check out the gallery for a heap more photos.

Our recent trip away gave us a fair amount of time to chat and think about where we are going. It was about 6000km of travel in a bit more than two weeks and that adds up when you are sitting beside each other and cruising along.

Meg and I talked about some plans for The Journey and got some motivation and inspiration along the way.

The latest plans for the house are for a large living area including kitchen, dining, lounge with a large amount of decking out over the hill. The position of the house (proposed, at the moment) has this room perched over the start of a gully between two hillsides with the decking joining the hills together.

Other rooms will be self contained with walkways joining them together.

We think that we can start with the larger living area, a bedroom and a laundry/bathroom/wet area room, so three buildings in total. Then, as funds and energy return, we can expand into other bedrooms and guestrooms as well as an office.

Besides the house, there is heaps to do including; a garden shed, another tank for gravity fed rainwater to the shed, winter vegies and a garden revamp, a chook house, some more fencing for stock and some stock of some sort.

This is beyond the immediate day to day requirements of work, exercise, producing vegies, fuel (cutting wood for the fire) and living and enjoying our part of the world.

Talking of dreams and ideas, I’ve been watching a show called “Grand Designs” on the ABC occasionally and picking up a lot of ideas and processes about building. This week a couple is building with straw bale (even though it was shot in 1999) and I am interested to catch it.

You can also check it out online at their web site:
http://www.channel4.com/4homes/ontv/grand-designs/

In mid-July last year, Meg and her Mum worked very hard with rock, clay and straw to build the cob oven.

It worked well and we used it to cook roasts, pizza and damper as well as baking dishes of tasty potatoes and more. But the oven was made of natural products and not sealed against the elements, so it was decided that we needed to build a shelter to protect it.

After a day of other work in October, Raph and I were inspired to dig the footings and hurriedly concrete them in fading darkness. It was a dodgy job without stringlines or measuring tape – sighted by eye and dug with teamwork. Concrete was mixed by the barrow load using our own secret mix of cement and various gravel, sand and road base variants.

Considering the huge amount of gum trees covering the property, I thought that maybe we could build something from the natural resources. (It would also be significantly cheaper!) I’d cut some lengths of gum that needed clearing and laid them near the footings, and that is where work stopped.

Three months later, the urgent jobs were out of the way and motivation came upon us with certain conditions; this was to be an entirely dodgy construction. We decided that this meant building without measuring tape, level or string line and using brute force tools such as the chainsaw, sledge hammer and axe and only materials that were already on the property.

Of course, a dodgy construction couldn’t be tacked together without an afternoon of Goon or suitable other drinks and Raph had just bought a cask of the cheapest white wine on offer!

Saturday morning started with the cutting the base of the posts to fit with the chainsaw and fitting them to the pergola feet with coach bolts. I’d started to trim the base to size with hammer and chisel, but Raph had a better idea – use the axe.

Much laughter later, we placed a cross member across the first two posts. The shelter was underway!

The next posts were soon in place and we had a square of cross members sitting on top. The solution to strengthening and bracing the structure? Why fencing wire tensioned with wire strainers, of course!

Raph had started on the goon by now, but I had to follow my own rules and only had a drink after the chainsaw was put away and there were still two posts to go.

By the time the last two posts were in, Meg appeared from over the hill with a blender full of Margaritas, some cocktail glasses as well as salsa and corn chips. It was time for a break and to reflect on our progress so far.

Late Saturday afternoon soon disintegrated as we laughed and wired joints together, hoping that the structure would stand the night.

Sunday morning started suitably late with a few other jobs to be done before we headed back over the hill to the work in progress.

First up was to decide on the method of fixing the roofing. Leftover warped and twisted permapine could be used up in this job, as it wouldn’t be used for any other project and was lying in a deteriorating pile out in the weather.

Supplies were checked and we were lacking in the right length screws to fix the roof purlins to the framework, so Raph and I headed to town. Unfortunately we were running a bit late and both hardware shops were shut.

I’d never considered buying hardware from Cheap as Chips, but they were the only place open. The upshot was that we stumbled over some wheels to suit the new woodbox that Raph had just built and bought a box of various sized screws for $5.

On our return we started with the roof, surprised at how fast it went up. There were a few designs for the roof, and I’m not sure that what ended up is what either of us was thinking, but the hills were soon echoing to the clang of hammer on roofing nails and galvanised iron sheets.

One design that had had serious consideration in the months leading up to the erection was for the external flue through the roof. This was to be the third of the three sections of the wood heater that we bought last winter; the first was used on the heater in the shed, the second was modified to reduce the diameter and forms the flue on the oven and the final section will be placed through the roof.

We considered cutting the hole in the sheet with the angle grinder, but Raph had another brainwave and headed again for the axe and soon we were bending the tin and riveting the flue in place.

Meg added a plaque that her Mum had given us about a year ago and had hung in the trees near the shed. The dodgy shelter and the oven that they created between them will be a much better place for it.

Sunday night was a bit bigger than it should have been, but we’d had a big couple of days of building. Because of this, we only started to climb the ladder and fit the remaining roofing sheets in the afternoon.

There was a nice sense of accomplishment to build something by feel, without planning too much and just taking things as they come. The shelter had taken on a nice, rustic personality. It was a perfect match for the oven and Meg loved it. The dodgy construction was complete.

Click for the complete gallery of photos.

It seems like ages ago when I first learnt about the government’s Australian Broadband Guarantee program. It must have been about April or May when visiting a client and she asked me about it and gave me some info and forms from Activ8 to explain.

Since then I’ve spent a considerable amount of time reading about it, applying for it, spreading the word amongst my clients and then chasing up my application to find out if I qualify and when they can connect me.

The letter finally came in December and we could finally rely on having internet access at home, without having to use a service like BigPond mobile broadband which would cost a fortune.

The installer had called me earlier in the week to arrange a time, but didn’t have much idea where we were, so I’d agreed to meet him at the Sevenhill pub and bring him up here.

It was an early start to the day and surprisingly crisp for a January day in Clare. It was the first time in months that I’d put a long sleeve shirt on in the morning. But the cool weather didn’t dampen my spirit – we’d have internet access at home soon, and without the cost of installing a phone line that we don’t need!

Raph and I did some jobs around the place, while Brett unpacked and installed the satellite dish.

A few hours later the moment of truth came. The satellite dish was mounted on the roof and aligned in the right spot and Brett pulled out his laptop to talk to the modem.

The modem by the way, is an IPSTAR broadband satellite modem with 4mbps download and 2mbps upload capacity, although it is set to 512kbps/256kbps for our install.

While the modem was configured, I plugged in my ASUS wireless pocket router and plugged it in.

We tested the speed and then I plugged the network cable from the modem to the router. My new laptop found the network straight away and I was immediately online.

I called Meg and let her know we were online as internet access for her has been extremely limited since we gave up the BigPond cable broadband that we had in Adelaide. Now she’ll be able to communicate with her friends by email again and get a bit more involved in the blog.

Having broadband at home will make a significant difference to my work as well. For the last ten months I have been using the broadband connection at my folks place most days and while it is great to catch up with them so often, it will be so much more convenient to check the little things from home.

Even though the shed is temporary accommodation, we still need to be comfortable while we plan, get approval and build the new house. In winter this was solved with an abundance of firewood and a combustion heater, but Meg and I both knew that summer would present an altogether different problem.

Sheds transfer heat very well. The single layer of colourbond sheeting gets very hot in the sun and quickly heats the inside.

The construction also allows a lot of air gaps which leak and provide hundreds of entry points for insects and creepy crawlies. We noticed this in the very cold weather when moving away from the immediately radiated heat of the fire the temperature dropped dramatically and the wall of the shed was very cold to the touch.

Millipedes were a problem when it was wet or in the days after a heavy dew. Armies of them would march across the concrete and through the gaps…

Warmer weather has brought more spiders with their skin-crawling effects.

Initially we thought that the cheapest and easiest way to insulate was to use a cheap three ply, tec screwed into the purlins and rails with standard fibre insulation between the outside sheets and the ply. It would be a little tricky to box in the skylights and windows with timber, but I figured that we could do it. We looked into it and even bought some sample sheets of ply and insulation to give it a go. But then a chance meeting with one of my clients led to a new direction.

Meg and I had both done some work for this client; Meg with editing and typesetting a book that he was publishing and I had been solving his IT problems.

It was only when Meg and I went to his office/warehouse to view the finished book that we started talking about things and he suggested using the Aircell insulation that was in the warehouse.

Aircell is a reflective sheet with bubblewrap like compartments of air trapped inside. It comes in a roll and is tec screwed to ‘C’ section and adjacent sheets are taped together.

Changing our minds was easy and that weekend we’d bought enough to do one bay.

Our neighbours, Kym and Ian were building their huge shed across the road and were using a scaffold to reach the roof. They were more than happy to offer it and it turned out to be a godsend. I can’t imagine moving around at the top of the roof of our shed using ladders! With the scaffold, two of us could work together with one holding the sheet and the other drilling the screws.

Of course, you can’t just stick to the instructions and we decided to use traditional fibre insulation in the roof section between the colourbond and the aircell.

More trips and more purchases later and the shed was taking on a new, space age persona.

The effect was immediately noticeable. We’d had a few days of warm weather and returning to the shed after a hot day away was stifling. Meg noticed one day that the potatoes were warm to the touch and going soft, even though they were previously fresh and stored under a bench in their wooden box.

After the “David Bowie effect” had spread over the full length, the shed is quite cooler on hot days. We lashed out and bought a pedestal fan and combined with the cross ventilation effect of the opposing windows, we can quickly reduce the inside temperature of the shed when the outside temperature drops at night.

It may look weird, but then we didn’t say we were normal and I’m all for function over fashion.