The masonry is complete

A couple of weeks ago, after Derek came back from seeing his parents in Murwillumbah, we completed the masonry walls for the house. By we I mean that that Bill the brickie did all the skilled work, Derek was the labourer hauling the bricks around and I just went to work each day :-)

Regardless, below is a picture of the house as it currently stands,

Internal masonry separates the lounge from our bedroom/ensuite.

You can see some of the real dimensions starting to form at this point. The garage is huge, but we knew that would be the case. The car is parked just outside what will be the garage door. And if you remember the floor plan the second storey over the garage is the guest room, which we are really going to consider turning into two rooms as it might be a bit too large, but we'll wait until it's all up first.

You can see two gaps in the wall between the lounge and our bedroom. The larger one of these is for the fire, with the small one beside it being a wood store.

So where are we at the moment with it all? Well Derek has ordered the metal, a large part of the frame will be metal, and he's also organised for a builder to come and help him put all of the frame together. All going well we hope that this will be completed by the middle of October, at which time the roof will be put on.

This means that by early November we should be able to have the straw delivered and start the walls. This is going to be quite a long process, we think. I'm going to take a week off work to help get some of it going, but there are a lot of bales to go into the walls, and a lot of splits and cuts to do in the bales to make it work. Then of course there is wrapping it in chicken wire to get the sealing render coat on, inside and out. So add to this installing all the external windows and doors and we believe that we will be at lock up by March next year - maybe a little earlier if we can find some labour to help with the baling and rendering.

Apart from this everything else is going well. Lily is a little bit nuts but really a very well behaved dog. My job is also going well, some very interesting things going on that are really stretching my skills, but at least I'm learning new things.