We've found some pretty random stuff at the local tip shop over the last few years. It's become our favourite place. Most of the people who work there know us now, and have some idea of what we're doing. We're sure we aren't the only ones, but it's a nice sort of atmosphere.
We've bought a stack of timber...
Tiles...
Pavers...
Loads of barbed wire...
Kyle found an old leather punching bag - I don't think he plans to use it, he just likes how it looks...
But the weirdest one yet was this piece of timber...
It's almost 2m long, just less than 1m wide, and about 10cm thick. It has a little rot on the other side, but we're not too worried as it's just the heartwood that's crumbled. We're not exactly sure, but as it took 4 people and a forklift to get it into our van we think it weighs somewhere between 200 and 300kg. Three of us got it out ok (Kyle and I mostly, but assisted by my sister Rachael), because we drove the van right up to the shipping container and just sort of pushed it along the ground on it's side. I'm not really sure how we're going to get it to wherever we're going to use it.
To give you some idea, though, it was a bit of a wet day when we took it to the property, and we weren't paying close enough attention, so we ended up getting bogged when we first arrived. After much messing around with bricks and timber offcuts trying to un-bog ourselves...
... eventually we had the bright idea of taking the big lump of timber out of the back, and all of a sudden we weren't bogged anymore!
We wanted a large, covered area that we can use as an outdoor kitchen during our build. This will become an entertaining space later on, and is a great water collection surface. We'd done up rough plans, and had a few chats with my folks about it, but at the time Kyle and I were really focused on getting the toilet block finished.
Apparently, when you tell your Dad "jeez, I'd really like an outdoor kitchen..." you come back 3 days later to cleared and leveled ground, two retaining walls, and 6 post holes.
We thought we should catch up at that point and buy the timber for the structure, so we let him loose on the maths of putting it all together. There was much discussion about dimensions (6m x 4m, determined by the size of readily available timber) and how many beams/rafters to have, during which we scribbled madly trying to end up with a common vision for how it would fit together.
After clearing the grass, Dad levelled the site with the help of two stakes, 10m of clear plastic tubing and some potassium permanganate (makes the water level easier to see - you can usually get it at a pharmacy).
He tells me that each of the post holes is within 1cm of the depth of each of the others. He was a bit grumpy when we insisted he put some gravel in the bottom first, saying it messed up his measurements.
Because of the slope we'll have a short retaining wall at the top and bottom of the structure. We had the sleepers already (we bought about 35 of them cheap and used some for roof beams in the toilet block), so that was an easy fix. The structure is set up so that the posts will form part of the supports for the retaining walls, but because of the length of the sleepers this isn't quite sufficient so we had a few shorter sleepers to hold the rest of it up. The bolts came with the sleepers when we bought them, so again a neat solution.
The bottom of each hole has a few inches of gravel and some sand we dug up from the creek bank, just enough to lift the posts out of the soil before we put some quickset concrete around the base. After much debate, we used rounded poles instead of square ones. Kyle tells me you can't get square ones that are treated better than H3 (at least, we couldn't get them), and since these are going in the ground we wanted to be thorough. We weren't as careful with the toilet block posts (we're still learning), so I guess over the next 20 years we'll see the difference. In reality, I suspect longevity has a lot more to do with drainage and not letting water sit at the base of the posts. We contemplated using metal stirrups and decided it was too hard to get them in exactly the right spot - we'll tackle that one on some other project I imagine.
After that, Dad cut ledges in the top of each posts, and on a fine day Kyle went out and helped concrete them while I was at work.
You'll notice here that the posts on the downhill side are a bit taller than the posts on the uphill side. There was considerable discussion over which way to slope the roof - my parents argued for sloping it against the hill to maximise the view, whereas Kyle and I are practical people and were much more concerned about rain and sun getting in. Eventually we decided on the former, as it makes the hookup to the eventual water tank a bit easier.
We'll wait a few days until the concrete is really set before adding the beams. Dad did admit at one point that his precision measurements probably wouldn't hold up to reality, so we made sure we bought cross beams that were a little longer than the intended measurements (4.2m rather than 4m) so we could cut them to fit if we messed up elsewhere. Also, as they are at an angle they need to be slightly longer than 4m anyway to reach.
Sometimes when I tell people what we're doing with our house they look a bit concerned and ask if we have much experience with that kind of thing, as though it's utterly impossible for regular people to do anything outside the norm. When I say not really they generally judge my sanity a little, and I assume they think we'll come crashing and burning at some stage and see the error of our ways.
I look at it differently - I come by such insanity quite honestly. My parents, in one of their loopier moments, built a 4WD motor home from scratch, test drove it around Australia for 6 months, then decided to drive to Scotland in back for my cousin's wedding. After watching that unfold, building ones own house that's perfectly stationary doesn't seem so far fetched. I'm sure my Dad would be quite pleased by this.
Of course, there are other bonuses. When you tell such parents you're building a house using an unusual technique, they simply can't resist coming to have a poke around for a few months. So we now have a self-sufficient motor home in residence on the property, which brings with it all manner of conveniences such as an induction stove and a vacuum pump loo, not to mention two enthusiastic helpers!
It's turning into a rather eclectic settlement, as our tent (the red and white one on the left) hails back to our days in historical reenactment and is a replica of viking tents during the 8th/9th century.
... 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.
Kyle and I are both having to learn a lot of new things to pursue this project. We quite enjoy that part, but there comes a point where we simply don't have time to learn everything we need to. One of the most significant areas was electrical wiring and solar panels. This is a big, sometimes complicated area that we knew very little about to start with (by very little I mean high school science level of understanding, enough to figure out where the cables need to go but not which parts to buy). The learning curve is not insurmountable, but the time it would take would mean there are other things we can't learn that we need to. Just like money, and building materials, and space, time is a resource we have to budget for.
So we're outsourcing for the electrical wiring. Not necessarily to a professional electrician (though we know we legally have to have one to do any 240V wiring), but to my Dad who has kindly offered to help. Dad had to learn all about solar panels and wiring when he built a motorhome a few years ago, which he and my Mum drove from Malaysia to Scotland and back (for real - go check it out). So he has a fair bit of experience with solar systems (though a bit smaller than the system we'll have), and how to repair them when something goes bung and you can't just drop down to the store for parts.
At some point we'll get Dad to do a guest post about it all, because we don't know very much about it yet (we're getting Dad to do it so we don't have to spend time learning just yet).
We ordered our woven polypropelene tubing from the Bundaberg Bag Company, who were the only supplier we could find in Australia that would confidently sell us tubes instead of bags. A quick look through their facebook page shows someone from their end has been involved in a few international build projects - I'm not entirely sure, but the water tank they built in Vanuatu back in April looks a lot like the one featured in a "how to build an earthbag water tank" instructable I found a while back.
The tubing comes in two sizes, 460mm and 350mm. Rolls are 1000m long. I ran the maths as best I could, and I came up with 4x 30kL water tanks at just a smidge less than 1000m. That was cutting it a bit fine for my rough calculations, so we decided to get two rolls of the 460mm as it's best to do water tank walls tick. This way, we'll easily get 4 water tanks and have some left over for experimental practice and the lower levels of the house. We'll probably end up getting another roll of the narrower stuff for the house build, as the upper levels of the dome can be narrow and the lower levels wider, but that's later on.
All up, including delivery from Bundaberg to Canberra, it cost us around $1400. We messed around with the idea of having it all delivered to my parents place in Brisbane and getting them to bring it when they come, but it turned out not to be a huge difference in shipping costs.
One of the first things we want on the property (after our symbolic veggie patch) is a toilet. Seems a no brainer to have a composting toilet, as we'll need to plant lots of trees in a few year's time. This is distinct from the smaller loveable-loo model we hope to have in our house - this structure has not been recognised by the council, though so far as I can tell it's in a legal grey area, and it's for the lead up to and during the build rather than while we're living there (though no doubt it will continue to come in handy into the future).
We've drawn great inspiration from Milkwood Permaculture's 'most loveable loo in the west' with bin specifics, amongst other variouspeople who've done what looks to be about the same thing. We love Milkwood - whenever we decide we need to work out how to do something (build an outdoor composting toilet block, for instance), we set forth onto the Great Interwebs and seem to end up on their blog looking at exactly what we wanted. Essentially, two wheelie bins sitting under a corrugated iron shed of varying fanciness.
My initial (very rough) concept drawings give you a bit of an idea:
The patch of ground where we want to put the toilets is sloped down to the north, so we thought we'd take advantage of the slope to take some height off the building. The bins will be on the northern downhill side, so the chimney for the vents has lots of sun to heat it up and encourage air flow and the ground is naturally lower anyway. Entry will be from the south, up the hill a bit. There will be a retaining wall along the middle of the block, that the bins will butt up against when under the building. That way we don't have to create flooring that supports people's weight, we'll just use pavers from the tip to make a solid, level floor at two different levels (one for the bins to sit on, one for the people to walk on).
Since we have the space, and we're building a structure anyway, we figured we'd make each 'cubicle' big enough that someone could comfortably get changed in them, and have a bit of space for storage of things like extra toilet rolls.
We prepared the bins late one night, just before the shipping container was due to arrive as we knew we'd need them pretty soon.
...
We've got taps on the sides rather than at the back, as the taps protrude a long way and I was worried they'd get knocked on the ground as the bin is being wheeled around if they were on the back. Vents are on the opposite side as that works well with what the chimney for the vents will be doing. We did two bins this first time around, one left hand sides one right hand sides. The bins cost us about $130 each to make up, most of that being the bin itself at $95 from the local big-chain hardware store. We made some expensive choices on things like tap fittings as we want them to last, and we went out of our way to get black coloured bins, but the rest came from the tip.
Out at the property the next day we took the bins along and laid out where we wanted them to go. We'd measured them of course, and had a rough idea of the size of the building, but wanted to mark it out on the slope itself as we didn't have a measurement for that.
We put the bins in place, then sunk star pickets along where the wall above them will go and where the retaining wall will go. Then we cleared the grass from that spot. You can see my pitiful little section on the left being rapidly overrun by Kyle's on the right - he's a lot faster at this bit than I am. In my defence, though, it's not quite as pitiful as it looks in this picture as post of it's hidden by grass in the bottom left of the photograph.
Accuracy didn't matter too much at this stage, as it's just to have grass-free space to sink the retaining wall and the posts that will form the structure onto which everything else will cling. The posts are the point at which proper measurements and making sure things are really square starts to matter. The grass doesn't care if it's square or not, and the star pickets are just our guide for where we needed to clear.
Clearing grass is hard work, but satisfying. Took us about an hour and a half for this bit, with frequent brief stops to check the rain that was looking a bit threatening on the horizon and the nearby cows that were becoming accustomed to our presence and getting a bit curious.
A few days later we returned to lay the retaining wall. We reluctantly bought two new sleepers after failing to find anything suitable at the tip a few weeks in a row. We dug out the downhill section of our little bare square, and settled the sleepers in place.
Then, we dug three post holes. Kyle had already cut the notches for lap joints in the posts. After much discussion we decided to piece the beam together into the lap joints and fix them in place (square) with brackets before we set the concrete to hold the posts upright. This worked quite well, as there were only two of us and we didn't have enough hands to hold everything in place otherwise and make sure it was all square.
We lay drainage tubing on the earthen side of the retaining wall for good measure, then started sinking the downhill posts as well. These were a bit easier, and we ended up doing them one at a time but held in place by a few star pickets sunk into the grass and tied with rope. We hadn't wanted to do this for the middle ones, as it would have meant disturbing our nice firm ground with star pickets just after we'd dug holes for posts.
We ended up with these a bit off square anyway, though not an insurmountable problem. We learned from this and fixed our methods a bit on the other side. Of course, being interrupted by a hail storm doesn't help much - all of this took place over several days.
Once all the posts were concreted in, Kyle got a bit hammer-happy and put up bracing on all the walls. This will be what we screw the corrugated iron wall cladding to later.
At this stage we have 8 out of the 9 posts in (we would have had all of them, except for our hail storm interruption) and all of the structural cross beams are in. The next step is getting the roof beams on, then attaching the corrugated iron walls and roof ($50 at the tip for a big stack of it, what a find). After that it's things like seats, probably some shelves inside, and finding a source of sawdust.
