Trying to be a bit green

At this point we'll take a bit of a "time-out", leap sideways and have a look at some sustainable-type things we're trying out at eightmangana that we couldn't/didn't do at the last build.  Before you think we're entirely altruistic and honourable in our intentions, a lot of the following make sense to us because they're going to save some money in the long run - which is a good thing.  They also happen to be 'green' principles - and pretty logical really.

Principle #1 - Orientation:  Found in any and every sustainable house design book, website, blog and pamphlet but rarely seen in real life bricks-and-mortar - not sure why, because it's simple and makes sense.  Face your main windows and living area north (don't care where the street is - doesn't matter...) and make those windows big.  Put as minimal an amount of glass to the south as you can (and make those rooms less-used ones).  Avoid western-facing windows as they'll catch late afternoon sun that you can't block out = uncomfortably warm.  Do what you like on the east - it's where the sun comes up in the morning...  All this was in our minds as we looked for a block to build on - in our case the view and the sun are in the same direction, which makes things a lot easier.  Of course, we'll insulate to billy-oh as well to make sure the heat that gets in stays in.

Principle #2 - Eaves/Shading:  They don't have to be the industry standard and better if they're not.  Idea is that eaves make shade.  The amount of shade depends on how wide the eaves are, how far above the windows they are, and where the sun is.  Our eaves annoy our builder and will annoy the roofers because they're all different, but they'll let winter sun into our main windows (=warmth... beautiful, not-possible-to-manufacture, sunshine-type warmth) but block out the summer sun from those big north-facing windows (because summer sun rides much higher in the sky than winter sun).  I used a highly technical piece of software called Publisher to check angles, heights, eave widths, etc and see if they worked:

 

Principle #3 - Thermal Mass:  It's great having a builder and builder's dad who are brickies, because we have 3 walls inside the house that are going to be solid block filled with concrete.  Why?  A substance like concrete absorbs heat from its surroundings, so when the house is warm these walls warm up - and most importantly, hold the warmth.  Then, as the house cools down later in the day the concrete releases that warmth back into the room.  Works in both cold and hot climates.  Free sunshine, collected in a giant wall-sized heat-bank, free warmth even after the sun goes down - perfect!



What you might call a "slim-line wall-mounted panel heater" - or just a big grey concrete wall...

 Principle #4 - Sunshine is free:  Hence the big windows and also our foray into solar energy at the more technological high-end.  Eightmangana is going to have both solar power (back-to-the-grid) and also solar hot water.  It remains to be seen how cost-effective both these are but we've found some good deals and think they'll be worth the investment this time - shouldn't take too many power and hot water bills to see how good a decision it is.  The hot water is a continuous gas-boosted system - gas supplements if the sun don't shine, but only as the water is used (hence the 'continuous') and only to the temperature needed.  Well-insulated, on-ground tank keeps water hotter for longer and doesn't need reinforced roof trusses.

Principle #5 - Rain is free too:  At least for now, until someone finds a way to meter and charge for it.  But we plan to put in a tank or two to catch some of this resource before it runs off the roof, through the pipes, into the gully and away to the sea.  Beats buying water from the council...  Plus it tastes great!

So there you go.  Our little bit for the planet and hopefully the hip-pocket as well.  Easiest time to do these kinds of things is when you're building

Off we go again

Having spent what feels like a hard-labour life-sentence (I know, I know, I'm an office-boy pansy...) working with big grey blocks, that's what we started with all over again as soon as the slab was poured.  The workshop/extra storage/music room/weights room/gym/etc-space off the garage on Level 1 still needed a block wall completed, which had to be built on top of the slab, so Lenny and Phil started that on Monday 15th November and we left Lenny to it on his own for Tuesday and Wednesday as well.

Blockwork going up in workshop - behind it will be a bonus little storage area under the Level 3 slab that happened to appear due to the way the slope/footings/slab all worked in together. Kids love it already.

Friday 19th we happened to have Grandpa handy so I conned him into coming out to the block to help - initially just a bit of black-tar waterproofing to warm him gently into it and then sprung a 2.5 cubic metre truck of concrete to fill the new block wall with - bucket by bucket.
Mixer truck driver turned out to be an old student from my second year of teaching, so that was interesting.
No photos of this bit - didn't have time to leave the wheelbarrow, buckets and scaffold 6 feet off the ground to take any.  Just try to imagine Grandpa and I trying to avoid each other, get most of the concrete in the actual blocks, avoid too much of a mess, and not fall off the edge...

...and we have a slab.

Wednesday 10th November dawned a little overcast and pretty cold.  I was down at the block early to welcome the concrete pump truck, a marvellous piece of vehicular machinery.  It parked itself like a giant blue and white queen bee in the middle of the driveway awaiting the arrival of the drones (concrete mixer trucks) that were soon to be backing up regularly to deposit their offerings.

The concreting crew when they arrived were far less poetic and much more down-to-earth - or just downright earthy.  That was at 9.30 and it was all over for Levels 1 and 2 by 12.00, except for the 'finishing off' by 2 out of the 6 or 7 guys who turned up to start with.  Finishing off happens as the concrete starts to harden off and they go over it again and again with hand trowels and their giant 'whirly-bird' to get the surface as smooth and polished as possible.

"Righto boys, put out ya fags, lets get on with the #@*! job..."

Despite the colourful language, tats, cigarette butts in the concrete and liberal doses of phlegm, they were pretty impressive as a team - each person knew what they were doing and did it; no mean feat when you're wearing gumboots walking through 4 inches of sloppy grey concrete with all that reinforcing hidden underneath.  Once the mixers started rolling in there was no time wasted and everything ran very efficiently.

My little extra job was to put 'threaded rod' (basically a giant open-ended bolt) into the concrete every so often sticking up about 100mm.  These were used later as a bolt to hold down the frame.  As a complete slab-pour newbie, I didn't realise how quickly the concrete would go hard so nearly made a disaster out of the only thing I really had to be there for... All good in the end though (and it's great to have dynabolts as extras!)

Heavy metal and PVC

No, nothing to do with the weird dress-sense of thrash band groupies, just more house stuff!
I spent a few hours on Friday 5th November on my own at the block clearing the landslip away from the back of the garage and tidying everything up.  Rapidly working out that our kind of soil really doesn't respond well to getting wet...  Sticks together, sticks to the shovel, sticks to your clothes - it just sticks.  So that was a fun time.
After a weekend to recover, Monday 8th and Tuesday 9th were slab prep.  Monday we spent most of the day leveling the slab fill material - needs to be as close to 100mm from the top all over the slab as possible.  Also needed to dig down to the footings around some edges, take a bit extra out in some spots to create a thickened slab (eg. where internal solid block walls are going to go - more on that soon), etc.  Today was also the day when the plumbers Darryl, Kurt and Mitch came in for a few hours to dig trenches in the slab fill (yep - the stuff we'd just leveled...) and then lay pipes for sewerage and grey-water (showers/baths/sinks/etc).  Has to happen now because slab-fill is easy to dig through, solid concrete is not...
This stage of the build continues to provide days where you work all day long (and there were 7 of us working on-site at some stage during the day, 4 of us a full working day) and by the end of the day everything still looks pretty much the way you found it at the start!
Tuesday made a bit of a difference.  With all the preliminaries done the day before we were able to prepare the slabs for a pour.  Giant sheets of black PVC builders plastic go down first to create a moisture barrier across the whole slab (great stuff to try to control in any kind of wind - or even a decent breeze - when it's 6 metres long and 4 metres wide...)  Would also be great stuff for a water slide... once we get all the bumps ironed out of our slope.  Then the reinforcing mesh goes in - 6 x 2.4m grids of iron bar that criss-cross through the entire slab to hold the whole thing together.  These get tied to the reinforcing bars sticking out of the foundations; they get tied to each other where they overlap by the specified amount; they get tied everywhere and anywhere.  There's extra bits on certain corners for more strength; extra bits anywhere the slab is thicker; extra bits thrown in just for fun... (not quite) until the slab really looks like a serious construction site - and a guaranteed twisted ankle for anyone not watching their step carefully.

Machinery that buzzes

Thursday 4th November was a busy day at eightmangana.  First arrival was Simon and his bobcat - not his pet (that was a white and ginger border collie/terrier cross), but machinery with ADHD.  This little mini-digger/dozer goes at 100 mile-an-hour in forwards and reverse and didn't stop all day long.  After him was the first of 17 truck-loads of 'slab fill' - a sand and gravel mix that went into the blockwork to build it up to 100mm down from slab height.  One of those noisy days - constant whine of the bobcat competing with the deep thumping hum of the 'whacker' compacter - with lots of shoveling just to remind me again how much of an office-boy I am.
But... as the day went on and the slab fill kept going in we rose higher and then a bit higher again and the view opened up down the valley as we gradually made our way up to the real height of Level 2.  By the end of the day you could see the view we're going to have as we eat tea each night or enjoy a quiet cuppa as a new morning begins - and not a bad view it is...

Josh whacks while the bobcat whizzes - like an alley cat on a hot tin roof after a double-shot of espresso.

Cave-in!

An occupational hazard of digging your house back into a bank is that while it gets built that bank is exposed.  Just add rain and the possibility of something happening that's messy, in-the-way and hard to clean up is pretty high.  Such was the case on 1st November after more rain overnight:

A good portion of the bank behind the garage detached and un-gracefully fell onto the edge blocks, breaking a few and creating a nice mess for someone to clean up - namely, me.  Being the kind of top-quality 'soil' that it is, it's either dry and rock-hard or wet and so sloppy it won't shake off the spade - both are annoying and make the job longer than it ever needs to be.
The mess was eventually cleared away with a few temporary barriers put up to try to avoid the same thing happening again.  This little section along the back of the garage ended up being cleaned out a few more times - water seeps constantly (even a week or two after rain) and chunks dislodge and drop in regularly.  Can't wait to see the retaining wall built, drainage pipes laid and the whole lot filled back in so I don't need to look at it any more!

Just like giant Lego

...but heavy as, well, concrete - and not nearly as colourful.
Blockwork began for the foundations on Monday 18th October and seemed to keep rolling on for weeks.  We designed the house to have a bit of character - what that boils down to from a builder's perspective is corners and levels.  Split levels muck up all your bearings and make it seem like you're doing 3 houses instead of just one.  Corners are just annoying - they take time, slow the flow, stop you getting on a roll and force you to recalibrate constantly.  Eightmangana has 3 levels and corners galore...

Lenny the expert brickie in action.  Nothing this man can't do with bricks and mortar - although for a man who doesn't swear, eightmangana brought him close at times...

View from the "front door" - little yellow mushroom crop growing nicely.

But progress was made and things kept moving along.  Something that resembled a fortress in grey concrete rose slowly from the mud and we started to get an idea of where and how this place was going to sit in the landscape - a little bit higher than we first thought but starting to take shape.

Catapult, anyone?

Main blockwork continued until Friday 29th when we filled up everything done so far with more concrete to reinforce it all.  No pump this time, just wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow emptied bucket by bucket down into the walls.  One of those jobs that feels like it goes on for ever and might never stop - but you just keep going,  encouraged by the concrete truck driver standing by his vehicle saying "Reckon I've got about 10 barrows left..." every barrow-load for 2 hours.

Once again, the boys float to the highest point available - no falls so far!  Future workshop area shown here.

Rain!!

The heavens opened overnight Thursday 14th and Friday 15th October.  As I've written in my little red house-build exercise book "Footings became water slides" and instead of a garage we had a paddling pool (although not one you'd really want to send your kids into...)
The surveyors ventured out to put pins (little concrete nails with pretty coloured plastic tags) into the footings - the most accurate way to let the brickies know where their corners were.  After handing out masks and snorkels, they did as much as they could without using scuba gear and decided to call it a day.  Hard to imagine that this muddy, sloppy, water-logged mess is ever actually going to look like something a bit more grand.  There's something depressing about trying to do any kind of real work, or do it cleanly, when it's muddy.  Rain - OK. Cold - can handle that.  Wind - sends you a bit mad.  But mud can be soul-destroying...

"After 40 days the waters receded, and Noah sent out a dove..."

Footings poured

Tuesday 12th October dawned overcast, drizzly and damp.  Not the best weather for negotiating a 14 tonne excavator around a clay-based block.  Everything at eightmangana gets very slippery, sloppy and sticky when there's moisture around, which isn't great for the building process!
Pour day involved a cast of thousands.  On-site over the course of the day we had Phil, Josh, Steve, Symen, Lenny, Peter, Sam, Heath, Darryl, building inspector, 2xwater-meter guys, a visit by the Wilson family (the small, male members of which promptly got themselves wet and dirty while climbing to the highest and most dangerous spots on the house site...) and Tim (yours truly).  It's one of those 'all-hands-on-deck' kind of days - it's a big job (well, this one was) and just has to get done, so in the end 4 of us worked a 12-hour day and support cast put in some big efforts to get it all finished by about 7.30 that night.  Just imagining the job without a big white and blue concrete pump crane makes me feel a bit nauseous...

Spray-jackets on and don't bother trying to stay clean, boys.  Note a few little yellow mushrooms sprouting...

Trench mesh in the bottom of each footing to tie everything together and make sure it stays where it's meant to.  Personally, I couldn't see it going anywhere fast but I'm not the expert...

Gum-boots mandatory for junior builders visiting eightmangana.

...and they like to find the high spots.  This particular set of 'boxing' (holding back the full weight of quite a bit of concrete piling up behind it) gave way twice as we tried to pour it - shoveling the concrete back in for the third time wasn't much fun!

Surveying

Next stage in the building process was to get the house set out on the block.  Usually a builder builds a set of wooden 'profiles' around the whole house sit and then runs string-lines and plumbs down from them to mark out all the corners of the house so that footings can be dug in all the right places (footings in the wrong places are not good - tend to cause all sorts of serious headaches later on...)

In our case Phil (the Builder) decided to try out surveyors instead, since it was likely that the amount of wood, effort and man-hours needed to put up the profiles on our 3-level house would have been enough to fully construct a small 2-bedroom dwelling on flat ground...  The surveyors load an electronic copy of the house plans into their surveyor-type computer software and generate a set of GPS points for every corner (we had over 60!) and then bring out their cool-looking equipment that calculates angles, distances and compass directions to plot each point on the ground.  Quite amazing to watch and reassuring to hear them saying, "That's pretty much it there - just move 2mm forwards and 3mm to your right."  Gives you a fair bit of confidence that it's going to be where it's meant to be!  6 hours later and they were all marked out, ready to go.

No photos unfortunately of the guys in action - me being me, I just forgot on the day...
That day being Thursday 7th October, in case you were wondering.

Excavation

There's nothing a bloke likes better (well, maybe there is, but not the topic here...) than a big piece of powerful machinery that can pull things apart, rip things down, dig stuff up and generally create [carefully managed and planned] destruction.  Excavation on-site started on 28th and 29th October - Tim forgot to turn the first sod with a gold-bladed shovel for the cameras, so that was left to Mark and his 14 tonne bright-orange excavator.

Basic idea was to cut in the house site at this stage and later create some level areas around the house to match the 3 different levels in the design.  The plan has a garage on the lowest level which pretty much sits back into the bank behind it.  Level 2 is 1400mm higher with the main living plus Dad and Mum's bedroom.  Level 3 is another 1200mm higher and is the kids area with bedrooms, bathroom and a play-room.

Hindsight shows that we'd pretty much put the pegs and lines in about the right spot - not too much dirt had to be moved later on to fit the house in.

Benjamin on 'Doosan' the safety-orange digger

Daniel and Melanie get in on the act as well...

Where we're up to now...

We're obviously not real bloggers or this would have been up a week ago and it would have been video footage.  We'll move on regardless and somehow cover the space in between start date and 'now' (whenever 'now' happens to be when we finally catch up - possibly after we move in at this rate...)
This picture proves that something is happening, and it's at Number 8:

eightmangana begins!

Welcome to the Wilsons building blog, where we'll (attempt to) keep up with posts about how things are progressing at 8 Mangana Drive.  As it is, we're now almost a month behind anyway - so probably some quick posts coming up to get things up to speed!  Ahh, it's great to be semi-tech in a high-tech world...
Let's see how we go!