Composting toilet block - part 2

See part 1 here.

Once we had all 9 posts set...

... we added a few more cross pieces to hold it all steady (there was a bit of give in the posts)...

... then started on the roof beams. These were braced with right angle brackets to hold them in place. We arranged them so we had a little bit more roof over the front, where the doors will be. The slope of the roof follows the slope of the hill, which is nice and convenient as then all our posts could be the same length and achieve a nice even slope quite easily.

Then we put in 4 rafters. This involved a lot of sawing and chiselling out of the joints, something Kyle was good at to start with and I like to think I got progressively better at with time.

The rafters were nailed in, and had brackets as well. Our site is quite windy, so we went to the effort to make this really super sturdy so that once it has the cladding on it won't blow around.

Then we painted the whole thing. Kyle used to be a painter/decorator, and is very keen to tell me terrible tales of what happens when people don't paint things properly (it rots). Since we've put a fair bit of effort into our toilet block, we want the additional longevity the paint will give the wood. The paint was cheap at the local hardware store as it had been mixed up to the wrong colour - the people there keep a shelf of mis-mixes for cheaps, and since we didn't really care what colour it was going to be this suited us well.

We were interrupted for quite a while here as the spring rains, pushed along a bit by an apparently extreme La Nina event, just kept coming every weekend we tried to go out there. We even bogged our van one time when we got a bit overconfident on the grassy hillside. We are now pro's at unbogging vans.

Eventually the rain cleared up enough to get the roof on...

... and the walls...

Kyle started panelling the inside with timber offcuts we had collected from the tip over the last few years. I quite like the random, rustic feel of it. The panelling stops all the radiant heat from the metal making the whole place an oven in summer.

Then we went to the tip to get doors. Hanging these was a bit of a team effort, as one of them is officially the heaviest door on the face of the planet.

You'll notice there's a gap in the wall panelling at the top on the back. Since this is the northern side it gets a lot of light so we put a window there! I took polycarbonate sheeting and bent it around the end of the rafters. There's a piece of window ledging underneath, and Kyle put proper window glazing on the lower sill edge so it won't leak in the rain.

At the time of writing this we've gotten a little further and are almost completely done, but I'll put that in a separate post as getting the seats right was a bit technical.

Planning for bushfires

Kyle and I are both well aware that bushfires in rural NSW are a case of 'when' rather than 'if', and that our safety will likely one day depend on having planned effectively for what to do when bushfires inevitably come our way. This seems particularly relevant when bushfire season is in full swing over summer.

So, at some stage in early January I started hunting for information on preparing rural properties far in advance of a fire risk.

Since it came up first on all my searches I started with the variety of widely publicised, government sponsored, bushfire safety fact sheets, figuring I could work backwards from there towards something more substantial (they always have that bit at the bottom that goes "for more information..."). However, I was a little disappointed.

I'm not particularly keen to simply take the advice from government factsheets at face value. It is reasonably likely that at some point in the next 20-30 years Kyle and I will be trusting our lives to these preparations so in my search for information I was after something more substantial than 30 pages worth of "that sounds like good advice to me". Given that the majority of this advice is aimed at more conventionally built houses (complete with ceiling cavities and wooden panelling, none of which we'll have) I was looking for some of the evidence underlying this advice so I could make an informed judgement about how it would apply to our rather different situation.

Now, don't get me wrong, I fully appreciate that the factsheets and bushfire plans and so on from the government and the RFS are probably responsible for saving many lives. I'm just not convinced that they're the best source of information available. The deeper I dug the more I found that any evidence that was actually available to me contradicted the advice in the official factsheets. However, the evidence also made me more confident of our ability to successfully design a property to be defendable - there's nothing like stories of people surviving firestorms in weatherboard houses to make you feel better about your earthen home's fire resistance.

Amidst my searches, I found a book by David Holmgren (unsurprising really, he seems to pop up whenever I have a question no one else has solved yet complete with a publication date sufficiently far in the past to make everyone else embarassed at not having figured it out themselves yet).

I bought a copy, and was suitably relieved when reading it. This was exactly what I was looking for - the book lays out an example of a property design that emerges as a consequence of good permaculture design and covers all aspects of the property that can act as structures and processes to seasonally prepare and defend the house itself. This makes a lot of sense to me, and is consistent with the stories I found of people experiences in defending their properties during bushfires.