May

A beautiful picture illustrating all the hard work and love given to our house.

Nicky & Robyn have now re-stained all the weatherboards and re-oiled all the window frames








The S wall just wasn't drying; compliments of the very autuminal weather. With hard frosts approaching (and their ability of 'blowing' wet plaster apart) we came up with the idea of using an industrial diseal heater using tarps as a 'tunnel'. The drying has now started but is ongoing as i type!







The nerve centre!

We at last found a cast iron in very good condition and Nicky has transformed it into the centre piece of our bathroom!

The final Plaster push!

After last weekend's amazing effort from everybody with the initial bodycoat application, the walls still required the 'final' bodycoat; to be the last coat until next year when the thinner lime coats will be applied (thus allowing for any movement in the plaster to show up).

This coat would be a similar composition but with finer aggregate; thus a finer finish. Greg, Nicky & Robyn mixed and plastered all week but the long S wall was still waiting. Again 8 wonderful people turned up on Sat and worked all day to help us finish that huge job. I am so humbled and full of gratitude that so many people, who are now friends, have given us their time.

Intersting the colour change due to drying. Initial colour is a lovely rich colour but dries pale.

Will probably try to repliacte the initial colour with the final lime wash next year








The S wall taken on a cloudy day; same plaster!

Hessian patches below sills to prevent cracking

Exterior clay plastering Weekend

Having been 'house Dad' for the last 3 weeks, due to a sore back, all credit must be given to Nicky and Greg for pushing forward with the exterior clay plastering against all odds. However with the two types of clay arriving in the nick of time; all the surrounding window insulation stuffing (that seemed to take weeks!) completed; plaster mix experiments analysed and straw wall hole stuffing eventually finished. The last, but no means small, task prior to the main plastering was to achieve a 'level playing field'. This involved making up heaps of clay-straw mix (found to be best produced in a cement mixer) and building out any low areas to the level of the main wall. Mainly around windows and the stuffed holes (where only the deeper recesses are stuffed with dry straw).


We pretty much followed the tried and tested formula of 'slip' coat then 'body' coat. The former, with a feel of thick cream, is sprayed on and then hand rubbed in. This provides the binding between the straw and the more structural body coat. This being an aggregate & fibre rich clay plaster, usually applied in 2 goes, totalling 40mm approx.



The body coat is put on by hand and is where all the fun can be had! It is a very forgiving plaster, like using straw bales as opposed to brick, and so most people find it a very satisfying experience. Thank you so much to everybody who turned up.

Closing in!

So what happens above the straw bale buck 'n' beam walls; more straw! But this time with an infill system. Due to the sloping roof angle and that a buck/beam system requires a constant level all the way round, we had a this angling section to insulate. The idea was to build a stud wall between the box beam and the top plate (under the rafters) and then insulate with wool batts. But we had so many bales left over we thought, why not use them!

The result looked very 'wealden' house design to us; Here's a link to a wonderful example:-
http://www.picturesofengland.com/England/Kent/Sevenoaks/Ightham_Mote/pictures/1095104





Here's how the idea progresses; On the outside, building wrap is secured around the stud wall and and then polyproplene 'CAVIBATS' are nailed on ready for the weatherboards .

On the inside polyester insulation (i will cover choices of insulation in a later post) is placed in the hard to reach areas. The remaining spaaces between the studs will be infilled with customised bales.


Once all the stud walls are completed, the weatherboards are nailed on. Above these, on the rafters, are nailed the soffit boards. Thus the finished effect in the photo. And sadly we bade goodbye to Craig; a year to the day. What a body of work he has left us with; just fantastic!






Windows! Greg has been busy creating them from timber i rescued from the three 19th century houses i partly took down. As with the rest of this house, this has not been a straight forward journey. Initially Greg and i spent hours searching through the container for some straighht unknotted studs (not an easy job!) for the jambs. We then needed to find even better quality timber for the sashes. This rather long winded process required various timber sizes to be cut out of some large Canadian Oregon beams i had brought up from 'Demolition World' in Invercargill. This involved pulling out all metal hardware (plus double checking with a metal detector), carting them upto the timber mill to be cut down to size, bringing them back and then Greg taking them to our dear friend Finn's fabulous workshop for the real work to begin. After many weeks the wonderful finished articles started arriving at the house.

Once the windows were installed Nicky has so patiently oiled and stained them all; twice! They look lovely.

And here's one for the family!

bale raising weekend

So the bale raising weekend arrived; a rather fabled and integral part of building a SB house in my mind (as every book/article about SB homes seems to mention one). Where do i start. It was a wonderful, empowering, surprising weekend of work, fun, friends and food. Everyone had a lovely time and we got a our strawbale walls too!

Basically our SB wall system is a buck/beam system; whereby the bucks (ladder type structures each side of the window/door frames) provide start and finish points for the bales. The top box beam (another ladder type structure)runs around the house above the bales. Within the buck/beam idea there are a number of techniques and the one we used (purely through Craig & I thinking it through as opposed to an obvious choice) was leaving the bucks 'tall' and running them through the box beam. This is supported just above the required height of the wall and the bales built up to it (i won't cover details regarding bale raising as they're in every book and best done rather than described). In our case this was 2.4m.

Once this height was reached the box beam was cranked down; acheived through running pallet strapping as a loop under the sill plate, up the wall and over the box beam. Once tightened this effectively pulls the box beam down towards the sill plate, thus compressing the bales and making the wall really secure.


The following 4 photos illustrate a important few bale techniques:-

Fitting bales between bucks around a corner. Bloody hard to do well as corners love bulging out in all directions; as this one continued to do despite everyones' best attempts. (Nicky & Greg eventually tamed it just prior to the plastering!)







Filling in gaps! Making and fitting custom sized bales; when there just isn't enough room for a 350 x 450mm bale! The one technique not sown is chainsawing bales down their length.

Lastly stuffing small holes with twisted bundles of straw.




The following 3 photos show walls raised but not compressed; hence the largish gaps and wonkyness. The third shows the debris from chainsawing!















The last 3 show the end results of everyones hard work; plus plenty of unused bales (for infilling the upper wall section; yet to be done)

Christmas fun & games with the bales

I came back after three weeks. During that 1st returned weeks the weather was fine; so i did all those really important dry weather jobs (not!); oiling the clay floor, clearing bird droppings off the P&B's, tightening all the nuts of the P&B system, clearing up the section and putting alot of the base for the clay floor down.




I then realised (a couple of days prior to christmas) that we had loads to prepare for the straw bale wall raising destined for the 8th of Jan. Thus the classic Wanaka xmas weather started (pouring rain!) and continued fairly consistently until the 9th Jan (and i mean real UK style rain!). A comic, Grand Designs style saga ensued with 2 weeks of bale soakings, people soakings, multiple handling of bales trying to keep the dry ones dry (50% perhaps) and then sort the wet ones into saveable (again 50% perhaps) and thenthe unsaveable composters.


I had heard about recompressing slack bales; (which all Kiwi bales are, construction-wise) and so we built a very basic, but highly effective, bale crusher. Thus Nicky & i spent Xmas and NY period in teh pouring rain compressing bales. The children were so patient and loved playing in the ever increasing flooded area too. Once we had compressed 150 bales (av 25/day with child interruptions) we then made small bales out of the partly wet ones for corners etc.


A friend came to help with the sill plate preparations (i thought it would take 1/2 day; it took 2 1/2), which involved filling the gap inbetween the wooden plates with polystyrene, putting the pallet strapping under the plates (more on that in the next post), preping the strapping and tightening the sill plate bolts.

To cut the rest of the story short i finished the preparations for the bale raising at 8.00 on Friday evening.

No photos of teh chaos as whenever i wanted one it was either pouring or the camera battery was flat or teh memory card full!

December

The first 3 weeks of December saw me being house Dad and Nicky on site. She loved being there and i so enjoyed being Ella & Lewis. However Nicky hasn't found time to write the blog so i will. Unfortunately as i wasn't there i can't really say much other than Craig completed the folly and Nicky did heaps of linseed oiling, moving around, staining and then restacking of the weatherboards. She also filled in all the soon-to-be inaccessible gaps in teh folly framing with insulation and put polythene on the floor (in preparation for the next stages)