That lived in kinda feeling...

In amongst it all the house blog just slowly died of neglect... We'll roll it gently over to the side of the road, pay our last respects and add some photos of the house as it is now - having just gone past 100 days in residence!

Forgot I couldn't rotate once in the blog! Turn head sideways to see our ensuite - nearly useable!!

A few little projects of my own...

It's a sad fact of working with people who are highly competent in their own area that you tend to end up feeling pretty inadequate.  And so, despite being the 'architect' for our place (in inverted commas due to a complete lack of formal training or academic qualifications - not to mention 4 or 5 years of hard slog at University - on my part), on site I've definitely been (and known that I should be) labourer, lackey, helper, gopher and general run-about.
So...
It's nice after watching, helping, doing and learning for a while, you can take on a couple of little projects and call them your own - and nice to know that someone (Phil) trusts you to get them done and then says something like, "Yeah, that's a pretty good job, isn't it..." once you've finished.


Project One:
Heater and display alcove just inside the lounge doors off the entry.  This is a double thickness wall that needed to fit snugly in underneath the kitchen bulkhead and has 2 recesses built into it - one to house the floor mounted heat pump unit and the other above it just 'because' - maybe for a painting, photo, cool-looking vase, shell or rock collection, fancy statue... you get the idea.
I had to get all the measurements just right to fit the heater, plus make sure there was wood in all the right places for the plasterers to be able to attach their plaster to, plus make sure it was all straight as it went in.  Due to the fact that Phil has all the cool tools and wasn't there for some of it, I had to do all this for at least one day with a handsaw and no nail-gun - and still got it straight!  Very proud of myself...

Project Two:
Staircase display shelf base - filling in a section next to the stairs that we initially weren't quite sure what to do with.  It steps up with the stairs and will eventually have shelving put in above it.  Phil left me alone with a nail-gun and few tips (possibly while he went away to fix something else that hadn't been done quite so well...)

Project Three:
Phone alcove - just outside our bedroom and near the kitchen.  We wanted to make sure we had a 'spot' for the phone - so that it didn't end up sitting on the bench because there was no-where else to put it; in a house of 36 squares and built from scratch!!  So I made one!  Will have a power point made for it and a spot for the wiring from the phone to run through into our cupboard behind. Beautiful...

You are my sunshine

Tuesday 1st February a little team of guys arrived to put up our solar electricity panels.  It's not a big system - standard 1.5kW - but we're hoping it will make a significant difference to the power bills.  It was something we looked at in the first house but had to cross off the list due to cost at the time.  It's still not cheap, but we came across a deal that allowed us to pay a very minimal amount up-front and then pay the rest off interest-free over the next couple of years.  We figure it makes sense to get some of the pretty much endless supply of sunshine energy that hits the earth during day-light hours and make something out of it.
It was nice to see the panels go up - 8 of them altogether - in a very pleasing kind of straight line along the back roof.  Spoils the roof-line a bit from the neighbour's place behind us (except there's no neighbour there yet) but approaching the house you can't even see them unless you're looking for them specifically, in which case you get a split-second glimpse if you're looking in the right place at the right time (and don't run off the road attempting it).
Our grand plan was to have them on and for us to greedily reap the rewards whilst not even living in the house - 2 or 3 months of electricity credits racking up in our account ready for us to move in... However, the electricity company's on to people like us and won't allow us to connect to the grid until we've moved in and moved off the 'construction' tariff onto the 'residential' tariff.  Clever people...

One of those unfortunate but unavoidable little details - the house roof works architecturally much better sloping up to the north, but the solar panels need to go the other way. They'd look a bit neater sitting flat but no bit of roof slopes the right way. I guess this way they draw a bit of attention to themselves: "Hey, look - they've got solar panels! Cool!"

Now you see it...

As we moved towards the end of January things started to pick up and the number of people on site increased.
Thursday 27th January we had the solar hot water system delivered - big 315L tank with gas-boost mounted on the side, and 2 solar panels for the roof.  They ended up sitting around for quite a while as all sorts of other more important things got done around them.  Even at the time of writing, the tank itself is still sitting patiently in the container waiting to be put in place and hooked up.
Phil and I also started framing in the kitchen bulkhead the same day, after mapping out the kitchen with chalk lines (which allowed me to see how close my amateur permanent marker scribblings on the floor were to reality... we'll not say too much more about that...)  Basic idea is that the roof rakes quite high over the kitchen area, so we didn't want it to feel like we were preparing meals in a circus tent or giant cave - the bulkhead brings down the ceiling to a normal, flat 8ft across the kitchen area while the rest of the space rakes up to it and around it.

Then the extras began to arrive...

Plumbers first.  They spent a few days on site running all the pipework through - cold water, hot water, gas pipes, outside taps (which run off a different system so that we can get full pressure), etc, etc.  This was certainly one of those, "Well, if we don't get it right now..." moments as they set up inlets and outlets for every tap, toilet, bath, sink, plug and other liquid dispensing (or draining) item throughout the house.  Being efficient sub-contractors they just work to the principle that unless someone tells them (at least twice) exactly where something should go, they'll just assume it's meant to go wherever is easiest, quickest and least hassle for them - sometimes even writing things down doesn't always work!  All the pipework looked quite impressive running across the ceilings - I found myself wondering how they kept track of which bit went to where.

Black pipe everywhere! 

Mixer set-up in our ensuite - we decided to spend a little extra and have a double shower in this house.  Whether we get to use it together in a house with 3 kids remains to be seen!

Kitchen sink tap set-up.  Apparently not many people have their taps coming out of the wall any more - surprised the plumbers with that one.  Sink-mounted mixers have taken over the world.  We just wanted the tap up and out of the way.

After the plumbers (and overlapping with them, to the accompaniment of the usual jokes that little cliques always have to make at the expense of any other - where plumbers are concerned, that will often involve some level of toilet humour... naturally...) came the electricians.

If I thought the plumbers work was complicated, these guys took it all to another level.  Photos don't really do justice to the somehow organised, but to the untrained eye completely random and undecipherable, jumble of wires running through every available roof-space, draped down through walls and hanging out of the framing everywhere you turned.  They somehow kept track of what seemed like several kilometres of wiring and appeared to know exactly where each bit should go and confident that it would actually do what it was meant to do when it all got connected up later.  We designed the house and the electrical plan and still get confused about which wires are meant to do what...

The other amazing thing is that with all this complexity and effort and time gone into making all these bits of the house 'work' - so that we have access to lights that turn on and water on-tap - in the space of a very short time, it'll all get covered up and forgotten about.  People will walk in and flick a switch and think it just kind of magically makes light... but behind the paint and plaster, running through the cavities and framing and empty spaces of the house, lies the work of some very clever people.  It's been good to see it and appreciate it up close.

Mr. Wiiiillllssssoooonnnnn!

Title is a reference to the now ancient movie 'Dennis the Menace' and a fairly common greeting in my early days of teaching - it was meant to be a reminder that I'm back at school, but in reality I haven't heard students use it for quite a while; the movie's well and truly past it's use-by date now...

Last post was 3 weeks ago and funnily enough, I haven't got back to this to post anything new:

end of long service leave + start of school again = no time to update blog

(a little algebraic equation for you)

Plenty has happened, though, so I'll try to catch up a little bit over the next weeks and follow the process.

Along with the wrapping, windows were going in, which is always a great stage - suddenly the breezes don't blow through the whole house, the views get framed, rooms get enclosed and it all feels much more like a house.  Nice to see the double-glazed units - glass is still a terrible insulator but at least double-glazing is so much better than single.  Plus glass lets in sunlight, which is free heating if you plan the rest of the house right!

Kids play-room windows. Loving the thought of doors open on a nice day and kids running in and out - sunshine streaming through the high windows above (onto solid block wall out-of-shot to the right).  Just a practical note for those who may build - big sections of glass like this need a bit of reinforcing around them, which our engineer forgot about until Phil gave the whole wall a bit of a shake and didn't like the amount of movement...)



View from our bedroom window (still missing 2 middle panes in this shot) - hopefully down the track we can look out at something a bit nicer than a pile of dirt, pallets of bricks and left-over timber. Ah, the project list is long... and growing...



View from our bathroom window - yes, the glass is clear; no, it's not a mistake - we asked for it. Our thinking?  No-one can see in from neighbouring blocks, the view is nice (this is what you'd see lying in the bath - trees, greenery, growing things...yes, we will move the pile of dirt from this shot too), and if it becomes a problem we'll get a blind!

All good things...

Wow!! What a day! Last 'real' day of long service leave (where have those 51/2 months gone?) and it was a big one.  This is one of the few posts so far that I've decided to write as they happen instead of playing catch-up in hindsight after-the-fact - and as a result there probably won't even be any photos just yet... the day was so full-on that I left the camera behind and Phil had to pick it up for me, so it's not here to down-load.
Got to the house early this morning to get a good start and found the insulation guys already at it, frantically (well, more like efficiently and with the kind of flowing rhythm that indicated they'd done it thousands of times before - but that doesn't sound as cool and frenzied as 'frantically'...)  working away to keep ahead of the plasterers, who turned up before 8am ready to get started themselves.  So 4 or 5 plasterers joined 3 or 4 insulators who were joined by me then Josh and then Phil, followed by Pete the electrician (briefly) and then later on the roofing guys to do a last couple of things to make everything water-tight enough to keep the plaster dry, which was going up at a rapid rate.
The first hour or so just seemed to blur... crazy!  Insulation guys here, plasterers there, Phil checking bits we hadn't quite done yet, Josh dispatched on little projects to keep ahead of everyone... and I had a list of little things to do that wouldn't matter if you bought a house but you'd kick yourself if you didn't when you were on site for the build.  And all impossible to do once the plaster went up.  Adding to the chaos was the fact that the plasterers started with a big pile of off-cuts from some other job which meant 6 blokes going in 6 different directions whacking up plaster in random fashion - looked like anywhere they saw a piece of wall.  Which created in me one of those senses of minor panic and adrenaline rush in case one of my little jobs got covered over, never to be done and always to be regretted...  In case you wondered (and may sometime build your own house), this is my list of little jobs:
1. Put solid wood 'noggins' behind plaster to hold any future speaker brackets or shelves in the lounge
2. Check that I'd done the same in the bathroom for a 2nd set of towel rails above the first (yes, I had)
3. Put solid wood 'studs' up the side of our shower area to fix glass and hinges to
4. Wire some speaker cable through the ceiling space from the spot where the sound system will be to the spot where the speakers will be
5. Move our overhead shower location by 150mm
6. Put noggins in our entry to attach some coat hooks to later
All small jobs, but the kind of thing that can make a difference later on (anyone ever struggled with the range and not-so-easy installation of things that apparently are meant to 'fix' into plaster-board but end up either wrecking the plaster, not fixing anything securely at all or just frustrating you completely when they drop a toggle into the wall space and become useless... ah, the joy of knowing there's a solid piece of 90x35mm pine sitting right where you want it behind the plaster that you can screw into :-) ?  or wanting to put your speakers somewhere different to your sound system but debating whether the speaker wire trailing over the floor or tacked over door frames is worth the better sound quality?)


And that was the rest of the day, at one point feeling like you had nothing to do and then spotting plasterers heading for a certain spot and thinking of something that suddenly became urgent, making a frenzied set of measurements, cuts, nailings and fixings, breathing a sigh of relief and moving on to the next thing.  Lunch-time was driving around to get bamboo floor samples and to the paint shop to try stains so we could match one and get the front door frame stained and varnished before it went up.  I did some framing, some wrapping, some solar hot water installing, some cable running, some cleaning and some trouble-shooting...
Then it was 3 o-clock and I had to pick up the boys from school - last day of long service leave and last full day of building all done...
That's it.

Wrapping it up

This is the stage when something really looks like it's happening!  The roof's on and then you cover all the walls and suddenly you're cocooned inside and can really feel what the house is going to be like and the outside gets filled in and looks much more like a house...
Usually a house gets wrapped in sisalation - 'silver paper' which is blue on one side and reflective silver on the other.  For our climate you put it silver side in so that any heat inside the house gets reflected back in and keeps the house warmer.  In a hot climate, you'd put it the other way around to reflect extra heat outwards and keep it out of the house.
For us the wrapping is far more interesting and fun...  We decided to wrap up our place in giant sheets of space-age bubble wrap which is also silver on one side and a very cool-looking bronze on the other (the bronze is pretty much the same as silver but it's less reflective, so doesn't completely blind the bricklayers when they work on the outside of the house - or fry them to a crisp...)

Ah - so it does look like I thought it would! Wrapping gives the whole structure a real shape. Still pretty easy to break in though - just need a nice sharp knife...

Not an easy job to do on your own or if there's any wind - giant sheets of bubble wrap act like a great sail or paragliding 'chute unless you can get 'em under control and pin 'em down with the very cool air-powered staple gun Josh has in his hand.

Front entry - wrapped up and windows in. Not the easiest place to get into just at the moment - might have to look at that before we move in...

Suddenly the house has 'walls' and once the windows started going in, everything really started to look like it should.

Was great to have an extra worker for a couple of days in the form of Joel - all the way from the UK and staying with us as a family with his family for 2 and a half weeks. Here he is wielding the staple gun with great enthusiasm! Josh's chisel in the foreground.

A roof over our heads

Good things come to those who wait - so here we are with a new roof.  The weather cleared, the guys turned up (including another ex-student, now roofing apprentice) and the roof went on.  Not much more to say about that really, except like the colour, like the angles, like how it looks, like your work fellas...

"Just make sure you pack up all your stuff when you're finished guys... "

Fascia goes on, guttering goes on, silver insulating paper rolled out, Colourbond corrugated steel on top of that - suddenly the house has a 'top' on it!



Inside the kids' playroom - a much more defined space with a solid structure overhead.

 

Level 3 roof almost complete from the south - looking at row of kids' bedrooms and their bathroom.



As the roof went on we also started 'wrapping up' - basically enclosing the whole house in a layer of insulative AirCell, which is like high-tech (and expensive) bubble-wrap... So now we can send our house to anywhere in the world for standard postage rates.

Let's put a lid on it

Well, Christmas has been and gone - both families caught up with and presents deposited (the stage our kids are up to means we always seem to come home with far more 'stuff' than what we packed!)  With Phil the Builder doing the same and enjoying a well-earned break, things have slowed down at the house apart from the occasional days and half-days I've done screwing down the battens, adding cyclone ties (no, not a common occurrence on the North-West coast of Tasmania, but it's good to be prepared...) to hold the roof on and putting noggins through Level 3.  The latter job brought on the inevitable death of my very cheap home handy-man-only drop-saw... but all these things have a bright side - must be time to move on to a more expensive and feature-laden model!


The most exciting thing happening at the moment is the roof going on - I have to add "finally" to that sentence.  We've entered the nether-world of sub-contractors now at eightmangana - that shadowy, misty realm where nothing is as it seems and very little is firm or concrete... just as you think you've grasped reality and the truth, it slips from between your fingers and everything changes again...
Subbies are those extremely useful and important people who only do one thing and do it very well (certainly the ones Phil chooses to work with).  However, it also means they're constantly in demand, working several major and numerous minor jobs all at once, are constantly juggling priorities and know that they're indispensable.  That means timeframes can change over the course of a day, let alone a week.
The roof was going to get measured and started before Christmas; then it was just the measuring that was going to happen before the Yuletide; then it would be measured over the Christmas/NewYear break and delivered ready to start on the 4th January; on the 4th the guy turned up to measure... I have to admit, the first delivery of stuff was pretty much that same day, and then the gutter-guy (who sub-contracts to the roofing sub-contractor...) had 4 teeth pulled out and couldn't come that week... and then the week after poured with rain for 4 out of the 5 days.  Ahhh, patience...


But...  good things come to those who wait.  In amongst the rain there was some progress as John, Jye and Dan dodged showers and tried to predict the weather.  Last week (Jan 10-14) we did get gutter, fascia and a roof on Level 3, the garage just about complete, and the gutter and fascia on the workshop/storage area (John working bravely in the rain on the latter on Thursday so he could give the roofing guys something to keep going with so they weren't on his tail this week).  Happy with the colour and the look of it so far, and this week looks a whole heap more promising weather-wise - I reckon they're out there this morning getting stuck into it!
Here's a rough idea of where we're up to:

View from the north-west, pre-roofing but ready to go

Roof almost done on Level 3 - from the south

So, what's the plan?

Realised the other day that we're showing anyone who's interested photos of a house in progress and yapping on about it without so far giving the 'big picture'.  So here goes...
We designed the place ourselves, basing ideas on things we'd done and liked at our first build; things we'd seen since and liked better; the site and aspect of the new block; general observation and only slightly critical analysis of any other place we've been into; magazines; the web; etc... 
First came the block.  We'd started thinking about the idea of building again, and talked about some of the very general changes we'd make, but a piece of land has to come before the plan.  I'm no architect, but still get frustrated by houses that are obviously planned before the land - then just 'put down' onto whatever block someone happens to find.  See them quite often.  Once we found the block we knew what direction it faced, where the sun would be, what views we had, the slope and aspect, where neighbours might be (none yet!) and could use all that to influence the plan.
Then we started planning.  Without a great deal of IT skills, I used Publisher rather than something more high-powered, to draw in the first few drafts of floor plans - stored on our hard drive somewhere are something like 10 or 12 variants as we refined the ideas and gradually developed the plan to something we felt really comfortable with and could 'see' ourselves living in.
One exciting step along the way was having a young friend of ours, an almost-graduated architect, play around with some 3D renderings of our plans, based on a rough description from us as to what we were thinking.  Having someone take our flat-pack drawings and turn them into something more like a photo really helped.  What also helped was that Sam did it for free as it helped him build an extra layer into his portfolio - so benefits both sides.
Since we're having trouble transferring the pdf floor plan from the draftsman into the blog, we'll use Sam's images to give a bit of an idea of our floor plan and possible end-result:

Floor plan from above and to the north-west.
Foreground is open plan lounge/dining/kitchen
To the left is our bedroom and ensuite
Far right is the garage, linked to main house by workshop/storage area
Smack in the middle, an enclosed but open-air courtyard to let light into the kids hallway
Top left is the family room/rumpus/kids play area
Along the back are three bedrooms and the bathroom
Study/Spare room between garage and the entry (which is at the top of the stairs off the driveway)

Same but from the opposite view-point.
Some slight changes were made between this and the final building plan but this is basically it.

 The three levels are:

1 - Garage with attached workshop and storage ('ground' level)

2 - 1200mm (4ft) higher are the entry, study/spare room, main lounge/dining/kitchen and our bedroom

3 - Another 1200mm up from this main level is the kids' area with bedrooms, bathroom and play room (+ laundry and an outdoor-access storage for all those bats, balls, raquets, mowers, shoes, nets, etc that never seem to have a good place to be...)

Idea is to earth-move the site to make a flat area for the kids (to the right of and behind the second floor plan above) with dirt from there going out in front (to the north) of Level 2 to create flat ground in front of the house at that level as well.

Sam's efforts gave us a sneak peek into some possibilities:

3D 'render' of the hypothetical front of the house, based on what we told Sam.
Idea for face-brick in between rendered/painted 'pillars' is ours.
Not sure if we can manage a set of stairs like that though...

Inside the lounge/dining/kitchen according to Sam.
We will have bamboo floors in the dining and kitchen and will have big sliding doors (furthest away) onto a deck.
We'll put in carpet in the lounge however - probably similar colour to the rug depicted but covering the whole area.
Breakfast bench, bulkhead over kitchen and raked ceiling are all according to plan.

...and so we continue

Monday 13th December setting out (drawing lots of chalk lines) on the Level 3 slab and then cutting out the top and bottom 'plates' (90x35mm pine that goes on the top and bottom of each framed wall - they're nailed together, cut to fit the chalk lines and laid out on the slab to make sure everything fits before doing anything too permanent...)  Trusses also arrived on a truck, which was a bit exciting.

Level 3 with top and bottom plates laid out to form the outline of rooms before framing.

"Posirafters" - usually used for floor joists (if you don't have a slab) but used at eightmangana as trusses where we're having a raked (sloped) ceiling inside.

[The Friday before, same day Level 3 slab was poured, we also made a human chain up a scaffold to pour concrete into our dining room 'thermal mass' wall (see earlier post) three-and-a-half metres up in the air]

Tuesday 14th Phil left me with Josh the Apprentice to start framing Level 3.  Josh, being the Apprentice, was pretty excited about being left with that responsibility and was keen to get the whole thing done by the end of the day.  We didn't quite get there but did manage to get a fair bit done.  The way our roof runs means some walls need to be different heights, which needs a bit more thought and care, so makes framing those sections a bit slower.

Wednesday 15th we kept framing Level 3 and also started trusses over the garage and study/spare room.  A note in my building diary says, "Looked like it was meant to!"

Thursday 16th was more framing and battens on the garage trusses so that the roofing team had a full roof to get started on when they were meant to come the week after.  In the end it didn't matter - the roofers rang to say they wouldn't be on our roof before Christmas and we'd have to wait until the New Year.

Friday 17th dawned drizzly and wet, which developed over the course of the morning into a complete downpour.  In a display of admirable optimism (or just out-right denial and stubborn determination) Phil decided we'd get as much done as possible and see if the rain cleared.  So coats and water-proof pants on and out into the rain we marched...  It took about 2 hours for me to work out that my 'water-proof' items were actually just 'water resistant' and by about 10.30 any resistance had folded completely - we moved from water-proof, through water-resistant and on to water-logged.  By 12.00 we'd all had enough rain down our necks and in our boots but had all Level 2 basically trussed.

Monday 20th - more framing on Level 3 while Phil and his brother-in-law Benj tidied up Level 2 trusses, adding the wider eaves, battens, etc.

Eaves out over what will be a deck someday.  Notice how much wider they are than normal - they're over a 6m set of sliding glass doors that are 2.4m (8ft) tall.

Tuesday 21st - Phil and Josh worked through Level 3 making sure all the frame was straight and 'square' before we spent the rest of the day putting most of the roof trusses on, and the house really started to look like a house!  I always reckon the roof makes a big difference - a frame is just a 2D plan extended upwards, but until the roof shape goes on the house has no personality.  Just like a hairstyle really, a different roof can make or break how a house looks.

Wednesday 22nd was the boys last day and they finished off Level 3 ready for the roofing team - made sure everything was straight, added battens, etc.  Day off for Dad the Labourer as we headed off to see family for Christmas.  They left me the fun job of adding a screw to every batten where it crossed a truss... over the entire roof... and I'm not great with heights or balance...

So after all the Christmas cheer was over and we came home again, I spent 2 or 3 days clambering around (very, very carefully - wherever possible with at least one hand as well as two feet) on the trusses with a pocket-full of screws and an electric screw gun.  Lost my nerve on a few spots where a 4 metre drop and a lack of stable-looking woodwork made me decide to leave those ones for someone more brave or experienced.

And that pretty much brings us up to where we're at - I've managed to catch up with ourselves!!  From now on we'll be able to update as we go and add new events pretty much in the present rather than in the past.