Concrete and Steel

The last two weeks have been successful with more concrete being poured, primarily for the porch and verandah slabs.  We also did the fireplace hearth at the same time.

We have also received the steel posts and steel beam to hold the guest area floor.  Many an hour spent drilling holes in the posts but they are nearly all done.

Framing has begun and progress should improve next week when the builder is expected to give me a hand.

A wonderful find

For those of you that don't know, the area of the house that we have marked as the "Studio" will become a library and a creative space for me - I guess Derek will be able to use it if he has to :-) Come on, he will have a gigantic shed so don't feel too sorry for him.

Anyway, the eastern wall will be floor to ceiling bookshelves, potentially a mezzanine level or a really cool sliding ladder. This is something that we've known in our minds for a while now.

There is one other design element that I've been hoping to obtain, a piece of furniture that I've always wanted - a set of plans drawers. We've found a couple of them down here, one needed significant restoration, and wasn't really quite right, the other was a little too expensive for what it was.

Then, the other weekend, we went shopping at a really cool antique/second hand place down here and found these:

Or should I say "found and purchased these". A beautiful set of plans drawers in very good condition which are a better height, due to the extra drawers on top. They are massive, so big that they will not fit through a standard doorway - which is to our benefit as they had already been sold twice, but to people who couldn't get them into the house. Fortunately we have double doors into the lounge/dining and them double doors into the studio, so no dramas there.

The coolest thing is that they came out of the Hydro, they even have a little asset plate still on them. Apparently they had their own workshop and they would have been built in-house, which I think is particularly special.

Not only do we now have a gorgeous piece of furniture to set the tone for the room, but we have our own little piece of Tasmanian history in it as well.

Now if only we had the house to put it into... :-)

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.

We Have a Slab

After a few weeks of hard work filling concrete block cores we finally have a slab.  It took around 150 tons of fill once the foundation walls were core filled and today the weather held off enough for us to get the slab poured.  We had a few light showers but this didn't stop the slab being finished.

So now we have a few weeks waiting for the slab to cure in the Tassie winter before we can start getting the wall structures up and the roof on, which will lead to the all important straw filling and rendering. There's a lot more to do, but finally being out of the ground is a great start.

It's been a year already

Wednesday last week was our one year anniversary of moving to Tasmania. We can't believe that it's been that long, although in many ways it feels a lot longer.

So a status update is probably in order to celebrate...

Lily is going well, she is generally very well behaved except that she needs to bury any bones you give her. Not for a long time mind you, it just seems that they have to be covered in dirt. Usually this isn't a huge problem, but with all the rain in the last few days we haven't really been keeping an eye on things and when we went out tonight we realised she's dug up about 1/3 of the vegie patch. Anyway, we'll get over it I'm sure

Assuming that it ever stops raining, we should have a house slab laid next week. Derek has discovered the worst job in building cement block walls - core filling them with concrete. He's made over 7 tonnes of concrete so far, and he's only just started doing the garage walls. Needless to say that he's much more like a tradie at the moment than a computer nerd, no more soft office hands :-)

On my job front, I've neglected to mention that I never went back to Housing Tasmania. Merc offered me a position to stay working with her in Disability, Housing and Community Services - I am the Manager, Service Improvement and Design (we're not entirely sure what it means yet either).

We'll post some photos of the house when the slab goes down.

Our floorplan

We've been pretty slack about getting this up, so apologies for that. There have been some minor internal changes since this was drawn up, but they are only minor.

Some notes on the drawing:
- the thick external walls are the strawbales
- the corner window in the lounge is a window seat
- the stairs in the studio go to a mezzanine level (we're unsure about this at the moment)

The quality of the scan is quite low but it gives the general concept of the building. For those of you who don't know, the house has been designed by Nigel Jones, who does quite a lot of sustainable design and has done more than a few strawbale homes.

And a building update:

We have a garage slab and the footings for the main slab poured. The brickies have been hard at work the last couple of days, with Derek's able assistance, and we have almost all of the walls in the garage completed.

Hopefully the deluge that has been the last 24 hours has now stopped and they can get on with more tomorrow - there has been some localised flooding in Huonville tonight but it hasn't cut us off from the highway so it's not too bad.

Our New Addition

For those of you who don't know, one of the things we had planned to do when we moved down here was to get a dog. The plan was to rescue a pound puppy, and we've been keeping an eye on the RSPCA Adopt-a-pet and Hobart Dogs' Homes site since just after Christmas.

A couple of weeks ago we were heading up north for Agfest, yes it was as exciting as it sounds and I'm sure Derek will write all about it, we found a puppy we thought would be right in Devonport. So after an exciting morning of looking at heavy equipment, water tanks and bogans we headed up to the RSPCA.

Long story short, we decided that Lily would be the perfect addition to our family so we adopted her and picked her up last Saturday. She is a Springer Spaniel/Labrador cross and is very pretty. She is 8 months old and has obviously had a bit of training, although she forgets it when excited - which she is very often.

We had a very sleepless night on Saturday night, but we think we've resolved the problems and last night was much better.

Lily has been keeping Derek company in the ute and up on the land for the past couple of days. She will be spending a lot of time with Derek while he is building the house, and hopefully we socialise her with the german shepherd next door quite soon so he doesn't have to keep hiding her in the car.