A to Shed

Blokes might like to spend time in sheds, but I’m married to a woman who’s just built one.

As we try to pull various different elements together in the hope of moving into a house with power and water, it was time to address the need for shed.  To meet safety regulations, the batteries holding the electricity generated by our photovoltaic panels need to be stored away from the house.  The risk of fire associated with any electrical equipment and the possibility of sulphuric gas emission from the batteries makes this mandatory, so a shed was urgently needed, otherwise no batteries – and no power.

Also housed in this structure will be associated monitoring equipment, an inverter for converting the DC current from our panels to AC for home usage, and our trusty generator for back-up.

Digging pile holes: The toolbelt and hat look the part, but the pink gardening
gloves spoil the image, somewhat

 Rose is an extremely capable woman, possessing the kind of mind and skills to create what she sees in her head quickly and efficiently.  I could draw you an amazing shed, but for this time critical task, she was the best man for the job. And even if she wasn’t, I knew it was her idea of heaven to tackle this project, so I embraced the role-change and did the shopping and laundry while she got started.

Rose's saw point

 Dean got the list of material she needed, and also gave us a huge amount of help with digging the pile holes and setting them in place.  The shed will be right in the path of the same gales which caused one of our walls to need extra reinforcing, so it needed to be as sturdy as possible, and Dean helped us make sure that it will stay firmly anchored to the ground.

A nail gun! Someone looks happy...

The structure begins to take shape

all it needs now is the outside cladding and a door

But its complete enough to house our 12 two volt industrial deep cycle batteries

Plus inverter and various monitoring equipment

Weapons of grass destruction

Serious grass-mowing hardware.

While the house has swarmed with activity, our property hasn’t exactly been resting in pastoral serenity, either. Before Mich could begin the excavation work mentioned in the last post, a firm request was put in that we do something about our rampant grass. The warm, wet spring had created perfect conditions for jungle-like growth around the house, while Roger’s stock grazing in the lower part of our property has kept that section beautifully presented all year.

Apart from appearance and convenience for the diggers, untended grass can quickly become a fire hazard when it dries out in the summer sun.

Rose somehow managed to convince a baleage company to come all the way out to cut an area which all the others had pronounced too small to be worth their trouble, so we now have an enormous lawn, and 18 bales of stock feed already going to good homes.



The mowing begins, leaving a deep layer of horizontal grass.

After being left to dry out, this is then ‘whisked’ into rows,
which are drawn into another machine and deposited as bales.

Which are then wrapped and stacked
(just as well, Rose and I almost suffered hernias trying to shift one ourselves)

 

For more on our deep and sometimes mixed relationship with rural grass, follow this link: http://www.stuff.co.nz/dominion-post/capital-life/home-garden/6080153/A-personal-war-on-the-lawn

Pipe down!

The Earth has moved, and then moved back again, leaving us with drainage, pipes and water tanks.

Could we possibly have a larger truck, please?

Over a three day period our Plumber, Mich, worked with a digger driver to install our drainage and water systems.  During this time our property was visited by an impressive amount of vehicles including trucks, diggers of two different sizes and finally a crane, complete with flashing pilot vehicle.  When our concrete water tanks were finally lifted into place I remember watching all this impressive hardware and marvelling that it must be costing someone a fortune – until I remembered that it was me!

Flashing lights and everything.  Oo - it'll cost ya!

 But I’m getting ahead of myself.  First of all, a trench was dug out from our bathroom to our next paddock, which will eventually be used to connect our revolutionary biolytic sewerage system (see Worms of Endearment) – due to be installed next Monday (!)

Pipe dream-team: Mich sights, and Colin digs

 Then more trenches were dug around the house, which serve a dual purpose.  Firstly, they hold the pipes which will finally give our roof water something to flow into (the mud created at the bottom of our unconnected gutter down-pipes always vexed me greatly), and carry this precious liquid to our water tanks. The trenches also hold nova–flow coil, collecting our excess ground water and channelling it to a soak pit, which will also accommodate any over-flow from our water tanks.  Regulations additionally specify that the soak pit needs a line of coil feeding into our stream, in the unlikely event that it also needs an overflow.

The pipes and nova-flow coil ready to be installed

 Finally, an enormous pit was dug, looking for all the world as if we were having a swimming pool installed.  This was to accommodate our water tanks which would be sunk 800mm into the ground, just above the current level of our water table.  All of this excavating was done with Pope and Gray’s usual precision (these men are artists with their enormous diggers, as I’ve mentioned elsewhere) and Mich’s careful laser sighting, ensuring that the water pipes have the correct descending gradient and that the tanks will be completely level.

Not a swimming pool, this pit will hold our tanks

 Despite this, a near disaster was averted when I made up for my ‘hole in the roof’ transgression in the last post.  After the second tank had been lowered into place and the enormous crane was preparing to drive off, I noticed that the tank was actually sitting about 10 degrees out of true.  Asking Mich if this was an ‘optical illusion’, he got the crane back in record time and the problem was resolved.  Apparently the fact that the tanks themselves don’t have completely straight sides had contributed to the alarming lean.

The first tank is lifted into place

 Although all this work left the ground around our house looking like a First World War battlefield, once everything was correctly in place the diggers replaced and leveled the soil. With the wonderfully hot and dry weather we’ve had this week; it’s hard to believe that the pits and trenches ever existed.  We find ourselves now looking forward to some rain so that we can start filling our water tanks!

Dawn breaks over our newly installed tanks, and replaced ground

 A very satisfying few days work, but now we need to have our kitchen installed and bathroom tiled before Mich can finally connect our water to taps.  If this doesn’t all magically come together before he leaves December 16, we will continue our ‘longest-ever camping experience’ for another couple of months – but in our new house rather than a shipping container.  The ‘crate’ will be returning to Royal Wolf in the middle of this month (they generously extended our tenancy by several days) and we will suddenly have living space for the first time in nine months.  We can only hope we’ll have connected power and water as well, but it won’t be the end of the world, if not.  After all, we’re used to it!

Funky Gibbing

Interior walls are something I’d always taken for granted, until I spent a few days packing glue and screw guns to put them up myself.

Gratuitous, but soothing sunset image

It’s been a while since I wrote. In fact, the spaces between my blog entries have been getting steadily longer. It isn’t because I don’t have anything to write about – or don’t want to - it’s actually the exact opposite.

We’ve always suspected that the process of building our home would always end in a mad scramble, particularly with the universal deadline of Christmas looming. Added to this, we are losing our builder on December the 15, as he leaves to start a new life in Tauranga, and our Plumber the day after.

I’m writing this on December 1, known and feared as ‘Snoopy day’ in our household. This is the all-important date when I traditionally dust off the Christmas C-Ds and give them their 25 day thrashing - with emphasis on my own favourites (one of them featuring a Baron and a Beagle).

But I’m digressing; the point is that we have two weeks left to make the most of our Builder and Plumber. Both will return if they have to – but who knows when? (This will occur during Christmastime in New Zealand, for heavens sake. I almost died once because everyone, the Medical profession included, was on a well-earned Christmas holiday).

Brad and Dean show how it's done.

To get to the point – the build is really busy. Dean has enlisted the help of Brad to help him in these last few weeks, and even I’ve been press-ganged – gluing and screwing gib panels to our many walls.

Taking a week off work over Election-time wasn’t easy, but those days I spent away from work were no holiday. Hours spent inside wardrobes and cupboards with only the pungent reek of industrial adhesive, and the screech of the drill head burring another screw for company, became my life.

I’m sticking with you, ‘cause I’m made out of glue...

I’m not complaining, but Rose certainly did when she came home and found that something had been installed on our roof without me even being aware of it. My excuse that I was stuck in a cupboard really didn’t cut it, as you might imagine.

Not only did my duties include the afore-mentioned Gib-ing, but I also had to be able to monitor and answer a plethora of questions from the builder and the team of electricians we had finishing the wiring. The fact that one limber little sparky got on our roof, put a hole in it while I was there and this escaped my notice was considered an issue – but when the roof addition was revealed to be the aerial connection I was off the hook.

The aerial connection which caused so much strife

Added to this, I’ve tried my best, but have had to suffer the humiliating and somewhat confusing experience of being told off by my own builder for what he considered some substandard work on my own house. I feel the tug of mental vertigo even reading that sentence…

I can’t fault Dean for being a perfectionist, his attention to detail and dedication to the task at hand has been hugely reassuring.

The Spring equinoxial gales arrived late, but made up for lost time very quickly. During a particularly ferocious gust, Dean noticed that a section of our west-facing wall was moving slightly, despite having been built to the specifications for extreme weather conditions. He told me straight away, bluntly made our draughtsman aware, and then ordered some more timber to reinforce the wall. Before this could be done the gales returned the following night, so he drove all the way out at 10.30pm to install a prop against the structure for all-round peace of mind till morning.

Could this strut have saved our wall?

The Plasterer began work today (an aspect of our project which we are looking forward to being done properly, for once. We’ve had problems in the past, but that’s another story).



A rising platform apparatus has been used to raise the gib panels up to make create our higher ceilings, so I’m looking forward to seeing progress and I’ll post again very soon – there’s too much to write about!



Rose takes over nail punching duties...

...and turns her hand to Gib-boarding, as well



Batts in the Belfry

 As we insulate our house with a certain pink kiwi icon, it seems an apt time to re-examine our ‘mission statement’.

Mich, our Plumber, steps into the 'pink palace'

 The project management triangle is often raised when planning an endeavour, or excusing a result which doesn’t meet with universal satisfaction.  The three points of this triangle are cost, schedule and scope and they constantly maintain pressure against one another throughout any project.

In building our home, this model naturally applies, but could also be interpreted as cost, schedule and environmental responsibility.  Our commitment to sustainable living has tugged constantly against our timeframe and particularly our budget, threatening to turn our triangle into a point of singularity and become our own time and matter-engulfing black hole. 

Rose and Ed examine the Gib board waiting to become our interior walls

 Another pressure is the well-intended expectations of others, whose encouragement has been more sustaining to us than they realise, but whose sense of scope isn’t constrained by the practical factors which our vision must meet.  For example: so that we stand a chance of moving into a mostly-completed house by Christmas (THIS year), without financially crippling ourselves, we’ve chosen to insulate our home with fibreglass Batts.

Other, more exotic and arguably more environmentally-friendly options exist (including natural wool) but Batts isn’t the pink peril it’s sometimes claimed to be, either.

Firstly, it’s made from up to 80% recycled glass, utilising huge quantities of a waste product to actually benefit sustainable living. Batts has earned an accreditation from Environmental Choice New Zealand which assesses every aspect of the manufacturing process and end product in relation to our environment.  But most importantly, it has a proven track record since 1961, guaranteed to keep our home warm and dry by preventing airflow through interior and exterior walls, therefore conserving our preciously earned energy for the next 50 years.

Dean cuts and places the gib board (seen here in our study),
ready for us to ‘glue and screw’

 The next few weeks are going to be a flurry of activity, with electricians, our builder, plumber and waste system installer all scrambling over one another to fit out our almost completed home with the services it needs.  By the time we move out of our container and into our new house this adventure will have lasted almost exactly nine months – a full gestation period!

While all this has gone on I’ve been responsible for hammering
in 20kg of nails to keep our new floor in place.

Down to the Wires

Our floor is now covered in matai boards, and the walls sprout electrical cables like multi-coloured jungle vines. This is apparently called ‘first fix’.

We no longer have to pick our way carefully across the exposed floor joists, risking life,
limb and under floor pipes. Now we could waltz across this flawless floor if we wanted to.

The spring weather continues to be somewhat indifferent, but with the focus now on the inside of the house this hasn’t affected progress at all.
Dean somehow managed to lay our floorboards in record time, so now it just remains for me to nail them all down. It will be a long, tedious and uncomfortable process – time to reach for the iPod...

Our under-floor black polythene sea begins to disappear as the ‘Planks from Palmy’
start to line up.

Meanwhile the housing for our solar tubes is mounted on the roof. We altered the angle
and position slightly (from 40 to 35 degrees) so it won’t interfere with our roof line too much.

The wiring is installed in the areas we indicated with our ‘symbols of power’
a couple of weeks ago.  Don't ask me what goes where...

As the weather warms up Rose discovers that the ‘solar heated shower’
she bought at the beginning of the year does actually work.
(Basically a big rubber bladder with a nozzle attached, it gets filled with water,
left out in the sun all day and is apparently very refreshing.)

Floor wheel drive

The travelling floor show hits town as we bring floor boards from another province all the way back to their new home.

The trailer looked perfectly capable of carrying our floor, but the little
Suzuki vitara inspired less confidence.

 As Dean fast approached the point where he’s ready to begin laying our floor boards, we realised we’d better make actually getting them on site our priority.

Back in August, we ordered some recycled matai floor boards from a disused factory in Palmerston North, and also decided that we would collect them ourselves. In the meantime, a little apprehension had begun to creep in regarding whether we’d actually be able to achieve this – having no idea what kind of load we’d actually be expected to carry until we saw it for ourselves.  The possibility only being able to bring some of it home ourselves, and then having to pay to freight the rest was just too galling to contemplate.

Borrowing our neighbour’s tandem trailer, we set off for Palmerston North, and returned to the factory which our timber originally adorned.  The poor building was in even more of a derelict state now, the roof thieves having turned their attention to the guttering down pipes, which had caused even more interior water damage.  Fortunately our boards were fine and we had the help of Jason and one of his workers to help us load up.  Jason approved of the trailer, which manfully soldiered the considerable load of timber, but had misgivings about our little Suzuki Vitara’s ability to pull it all the way home.  Commonly known as Barry (he’s white, get it?) this humble vehicle has been the best car we’ve ever owned , triumphing over everything we’ve thrown at him, so we still clung to some hope.

Enduring some mild ridicule over the washing line rope and bungee cords we had expected to tie our load down with, we purchased a ratchet cord, grabbed some lunch, and then made an assault on the hill leading back to the Wairarapa.  

Crawling up the steep incline while trying not to let traffic build up behind us, we nervously watched the temperature gauge all the way.  But once we reached the summit, things got easier and once again, Barry came through.  It was a very slow trip home, with our rapidly emptying petrol gauge becoming the one to watch but our mighty load didn’t budge a millimetre - must have been the washing line rope.

Rose relaxes in the sun after the floor boards are safely stacked in our bedroom

 After the floor was unloaded another important job beckoned before the boards could be laid.  I’ve mentioned our high water table often, and this can result in a house’s underfloor becoming very damp as the moisture as drawn upwards by the warmth of the rooms above.  Some cases have even reported constant dripping water as if a pipe has burst.  A solution is to cover the ground under the house with heavy black polythene, which acts as a very effective moisture barrier.  Obviously the time to do this was while we still have easy access beneath the floor, so I donned my boiler suit and once again became the ‘under-floor monkey’. As I slithered about in the cramped semi-darkness I recalled a news report I’d heard about emergency services in Turkey using particularly thin people to locate and rescue survivors buried in earthquake rubble.  Perhaps I’ve missed my calling…

Within a couple of days, a smooth sea of black plastic covered every centimetre of our under-floor space, painstakingly cut and fitted around piles. And as of next week – we’ll be floored!

The ‘under-floor monkey’ begs to be let out into the light