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!