Growing the East Wall

East Wall, days 1+2

With the drainage and guttering work completed, we were able to start the East Wall, and that's what we'll be building over winter.

The twin aims of this blog are to keep me and TJ motivated to keep building when it's cold, and to entertain some Canadians.

It actually does help knowing that a few people are reading this, because it is a bit tempting to sit inside by the wood fire until Spring.  But this is the last update for a few weeks.  We're off to explore some forest for a week, and won't be building again for a few weeks after we get back, unless I can find a way to lift the formwork single-handed

We originally planned to have all the walls built and one coat of outside render by autumn equinox, so we could do inside carpentry work over winter.  Yeah, that was a nice dream.  But I don't mind not achieving it, because the things that distracted us were a lot of fun.

The revised winter plan is just to keep going on the East Wall and finish off the ceiling / roof cavity.

Matching Hepburn Wind t-shirts.  How cool are we?

So gradually the East Wall is growing.  Whenever find a few hours, we do another section.

People drop in to see how it's going and hand out t-shirts. That's our niece M, who is a part-owner of the the shed, under the "you built it? you own it" policy.

Day 4

Those darker sections are the wet mud from last weekend's building session.  I'm trying to raise the wall as evenly as possible, rather than doing one panel at a time like I did on the South Wall, because the panels shrink as they dry and it's best if panels on the same wall shrink together.  There are bamboo rods sticking through the gap in the vertical studs to tie the wall panels together a bit, plus a core of mud-straw mix.  If they shrank at different rates, the connection between the panels would be weakened or broken.

We're nearly up to where two of the window go - which is pretty cool. I'm looking forward to framing and fitting the windows.  And if the building inspector is reading this, take a look and you'll see we added an extra pice of bracing, and re-attached the old bracing a little lower.

Nerd stats: the Day 4 section is 1.3m2 of wall x 25cm thick.  It used one bale of straw.  It was the first really cold day - maybe 14oC outside.  (Yes, Canadians, pity us.)

Next jobs?  Cut off and replace the low west-wall section that was damaged by those freaky storms last January before we got the verandah on.  Complete the tall west-wall section, by mudding up the gap at the top now it's finished drying and shrinking.  Figure out how to do the corners of the building.  Wire up for solar.  Possum-proof the ceiling cavity.  Add a ledge to the south wall for swallows to nest on, and a tube for micro-bats.

Tiny little stones un-rubbished

waste-stone ramp

One of the neato things about building with earth is that there are no waste products.  Everything is a building product, whether you know what to do with it or not.

When we wash the wheelbarrow or the mixer, we keep the washing-water because it contains perfectly good clay for the next mix.  Even when we wash our gloves and tools, we are harvesting clay for next time.

When the strip footings were dug for the walls, the digger dumped two big piles - one of sub-soil and one of odd-sized rubble rocks.  

Clay sticks to things, so harvesting it means basically washing it off things.  We harvest clay out of the sub-soil pile by throwing spade-fulls into the mixer, adding water and pressing the start button.  The clay is washed off the hundreds of tiny little stones, and we pour it out.  Inside the mixer, all the little stones are leftover.  

We've been dumping and compacting the little stones about the building site to make ramps for the wheelbarrow.  We hadn't really thought much about it until we started noticing the pretty colours the tiny little stones were starting to go, after a few months of sun and rain.

So, we've decided to abandon plans to buy fill and pavers to make a floor for the verandah.  TJ took the pile of leftover rock-rubble, dumped it under the verandah and tamped it down - pause here and look at the photo and contemplate the size of the task.  He did it in one day.  That's 6m x 1.5m x up to 10cm deep.  The pile was exactly the right size, which is spooky.

Rubble base for tiny little stone topping

Now gradually as we build, we will spread the tiny little stones from the bottom of the mixer over the rubble base and tamp them down a bit.  It won't ever be absolutely stable like proper paving, but it will make a perfectly safe and really quite pretty flat surface that crunches satisfactorily when you walk on it. It will blend aesthetically with the walls because the walls and the stones spent millions of years together before we came along.

Now, since this is a bit of a random post about 'ain't nature neat', here's a picture of a golden orb weaver web.

Golden Orb-weaver web is golden

I managed to get well into middle age before somebody pointed out the bleeding obvious -  that these webs are actually golden - it's not a trick of the light.  I'm clearly at my least observant when I've nearly walked into a spider the size of a tea-cup.  This year, which is either a really good or bad year for spiders generally (depending on your point of view), the Golden Orb-weavers are about the size of tea-pots.

The TLAR method of window placement

You know you're never going to get an actual tip about a building method on this blog, don't you?

TLAR is inspired by how my Grandfather made dresses for his daughters.  Legend has it (and everything about him is legend - eg he met his bride singing Tristan to her Isolde) that he would hold a piece of fabric up in front of a passing daughter, pin, pleat and mutter, then send her off to have a bath and get ready.  When she emerged, she slipped into a new frock and he went back to inventing air compressor patents, writing literary reviews or similar.

We need some windows in the east wall, we like passive solar and 3D design is hard.  But mud shed can't be any harder than clothing a teenager, right?

So we held windows up against the east wall at about equinox, which is when we want the sun to come in the windows each year.  When somebody said That Looks About Right (TLAR) we put a pencil mark on the frame.

Horizontal? Nyeh.

2nd vertical window? Yeah TLAR.

And one on this side, yes.

Those windows will need shading in Summer.  So around solstice we'll see how much shade they get from the roof and decide if we need to add some. We'll leave some decent supporting framework embedded in the mud in case we decide to make some awnings, but maybe it will be canvas blinds.  TJ fancies permanent shutters that open to the side, because they would offer top bushfire protection as well as conforming to some aesthetic standard I hadn't realised he held.

Sharp eyed readers will notice all the windows are behind the diagonal strapping that holds the frame rigid.  Once we had the window locations marked, we cut and re-attached the strapping.

Sadly, I didn't get an "after" photo before we started burying the new strapping in mud.  You know, this is the one thing the building inspector would worry about and I forgot to goddamn photograph it.  I kind of like the building inspector, though.  He came out to inspect the frame, and tested it by grabbing bits of it and giving them a good shake. Very TLAR.

Also, what about those windows, ey?  Five bucks at the Daylesford Tip, the pair of them. See-through and everything.  Bargain.

The TLAR method of window placement took us about half an hour.  Yes, we have done more since then.  I'm just slack with the blog, and the computer is in a cold room.  I'm going to catch up by doing a few more posts in the next couple of days, then after that we won't be about to build for at least three weeks.