Blog 16: Framing and House Sitting (Nov/Dec 2018)

November brought a change in the weather, spring had been generally clear, fine weather and the farmers were talking about how dry it was getting, a potential drought season… next thing we enter several weeks of showers with patches of heavy rain and many days where we are inside the cloud base. 

Happy farmers! not so great though working on a building site inside a cloud… but in the end we only lost a couple of working days in the run through to Christmas, because I didn’t want to risk cutting up the driveway after, or during, heavy rain.

On the building site a lot of framing timber, beams, plywood, nails, brackets and bolts were delivered, and the steel portals were also delivered to site and lifted up into place. Somehow these deliveries consistently aligned with brief patches of clear weather and so the driveway was not too wet to handle the trucks.

Pat and I are building the timber frames on site - unusual these days but it makes sense when the house is not being built off a “standard” set of plans, and has been a great experience, for both learning and weight loss :-).

I should clarify at this point, that Pat is a builder and while I am on record as an owner builder.. in reality I am labouring for my builder Pat, this seems to be working well so far...  :-)

As soon as the framing started going up the house began materialising before our eyes, that’s where that window will be, the door, the deck, the view etc.. suddenly the house felt big… but all things are relative, and we have been assured that our perception of big and small will wax and wane as the build progresses..

When the steel portals were lifted into place, our loo was relegated to second place… at least in attention grabbing stakes for anyone driving up the road..  the front of the house, floor to the eaves, is more than 5 metres!

Then there was more framing, hold downs, plumbing and then bracing the walls as we went, and mobile scaffolding went up so we could complete the box beam and frame up the North wall.

During November we had two other notable events, the first is that we were kindly offered a house sit by our friends Paul and Julie. I worked under Paul’s mentorship for several years in the early days of my IT career and his wife Julie was a preschool teacher who looked after two of our (now grown) children, Michael and Sarah, so we go way back… They have a new house just 3 km’s up the road from where we are building and we moved in for nearly 3 weeks, it was a pleasure looking after their chickens and veggie garden and enjoying the fruits of both and also hot baths after a day on the tools, luxury!! Thanks Paul and Julie, awesome.. and any time :-)

The second was the front gate of Nga Kereru getting a handle…

The front gate gets a lot of use and had just a 4x2 timber bar to slide but no handle, so opening and closing the gate was not easy anytime and could be quite difficult during or after rain..

Much to everyones relief we fitted two big brass eyelet’s to the timber rail and they have worked a treat, the little things are important… :-)

Pats border collie Lilly on a toilet paper lead :-) someone (probably me…) forgot to secure the toilet roll and it blew out in a Northerly

In November we also attended a day Earth (Clay) Plastering workshop led by Pat.

A really fun day meeting other enthusiastic owner builders (present and future) of straw buildings, learned heaps from Pat’s instruction and also got hands-on which is how I learn best.

Great preparation for the reality of plastering our entire house with its over height walls inside and out :-) and we had an awesome pot luck Pizza toppings lunch with Pat’s home made Pizza oven stoked dutifully by Sam.

Framing continued into December as the front wall and its wooden portal took shape.. we prepared for the measure up from Andy at Tumu Timber who was making our roof trusses, and then while they were being cut, assembled and pre-nailed off-site we carried on with our final preparations with more holdowns, more bracing and completing the double top plate ready for their delivery.

During this time the garage door and our exterior joinery order with Thermadura have both been confirmed and work is underway or booked in, and…. drum roll…. supply of our 320 straw bales has also been confirmed, with baling scheduled for late January (great, an early season by the looks of it) and its coming from where? I hear you ask… another drum roll please…..  Kereru station of course, yep that’s Kereru station and not by any earthly design. There’s a big smile being cracked here and now somewhere in the collective consciousness :-)

Also in December I built the pump shed from a flat pack in the evenings, and then Bob and I assembled it on the pump shed concrete slab. A couple of days later Kenny and Ayden were back again to do the freshwater pipe out, connecting up the tank to the stormwater feed (dry line) through a maelstrom filter, setup the water pump, filtration and UV treatment system and the spring water/rainwater manifold for switching supplies in the pump shed, plumb in the rainwater tank overflow and the return supply line to the house.. all so I could backfill the stormwater line trench to finish off the day, a big day - great to get that all done !

With the roof trusses delivered and craned into place as December comes to a close, it’s now full steam ahead with final preparations underway for Michael who will arrive in early January from Sydney to put on the roof with us, we are on track!

For anyone reading who wants to know more about how the timber buck frames, box beams and straw bales combine to create a wall, take a look at our Eco-Design section for more details.

I felt we should finish the last blog of 2018 with a collage of the many different moods of Maraetotara, everything comes back to mother nature - the land, the weather, life.. and then a final shot of the house site as we go into Christmas, enjoy..

21st December… a great way to go into Christmas, scaffolding up, roof trusses in place Thanks everyone who has been involved to date !! and in particular our friend and builder Pat Mawson, Grazie mille :-)