Rain stops play, but this place will live forever

Verity

Winter has recently included a quantity of freezing drizzly rain.  So there's been nothing to do but sit inside by the wood fire and go bush walking with awesome visiting kids who don't give a fig about cold, night falling or punctual meals.

It's going to rain on and off all week and next weekend, which is a bit depressing.  We have two completely free days and a couple of volunteers offering to come and help next weekend.  I'm worried I'll going to spend two days making them hot cocoa and feeding the fire instead of getting muddy.

For the sake of any Canadians reading this, can I say it was MINUS THREE DEGREES last weekend. You're impressed, aren't you?  That's cold enough for ice to form in the bird bath. Sure, that was at dawn and I was asleep, but still.  MINUS THREE, MAN.

Yesterday we went to a celebration for the 1000th property in Victoria to be protected forever by a Trust for Nature conservation covenant.  We are one of those thousand.  Here, have a Sugar Glider.

It's great being in a room full of people, and you don't know most of them, but you know you can walk up and talk to anyone and they'll be a kindred spirit.  Also, it was at a winery, and Lindy Lumsden brought along her pet microbat, and fed it meal-worms.

A conservation covenant is a voluntary agreement between the landholder and the state government, which creates binding alteration to the land title, and is annexed to the planning legislation.  The allowable land use is altered forever to prevent land clearing and other negative uses, and promote positive action like restoration and weed prevention.  Trust for Nature brokers the covenants and performs a number of other useful functions.

The great thing is that the present Prime Minister is getting ready to pass climate change legislation that will actually pay landholders to preserve natural areas in this way, because permanent biodiverse reserves are an efficient way to promote soil carbon and prevent dangerous climate change, so hopefully one day we will have a landscape full of reserves across the country, connecting private and public reserves.

To celebrate the 1000th covenant, Trust for Nature has done number of endearing things, including making this video (nb the animals start moving at about 1.39).

If it ever stops being cold and rainy, normal blogular service will resume.

Window options - help us decide!

TJ prepares to frame the new window

It was too rainy last weekend to play with the mud.  So we went to the Daylesford Tip Shop and bought  a piece of glass for a new window.  It cost a buck.  It needs framing, which is TJ's job, and we have to decide where to put it, which is where you come in.

Here are our options, set out in picture form, using my mad photo editing skillz.

This window will go on a part of the building we would prefer to keep dark - that's why all the windows are down the other end of the building. An internal wall will partially divide the building, creating the dark corner we want, but it will also prevent air from the other windows from circulating in that part of the building. Temperatures here can get over 45 celsius (113 fahrenheit) and often go over 40 celsius (104 F), so we need a window for ventilation. We're a bit worried that the  building is so well insulated that if it gets hot, it will stay hot unless we can get the heat out at night.

The two options for this long, thin window are: horizontal and vertical.

Horizontal, hinged at the top


Advantages: This is the easiest option to build.  We could attach the window frame to the wooden top-plate, and hang the window with hinges at the top, opening inwards.  The wall isn't so high - we'd just have to step up on something to open it.

Since the window would be tucked up under the eaves, it would be well shaded and protected from the weather, so we wouldn't need a proper window sill or flashing.

Hot air rises, so a horizontal window at that point would be the most efficient way to get rid of heat.

Disadvantages:  What's the point of a window that looks out onto the underneath of eaves?

In order to reach the window easily, we'd have to hang it on the inside edge of the 25cm thick wall.  All the other windows will be flush with the outside edge of the wall, with a lovely wide window sill on the inside.

I'm fairly certain that a wide sill made of mud in that location will become a nesting spot for swallows.  Which would prevent us opening the window, and will look messy with streaks of guano below the nest (not that I care, I love swallows).


Vertical window, hinged at the side


Advantages: A vertical window in this spot would give a perfectly framed glimpse of a lovely clump of trees, and help make up for the other east wall and north wall windows, which will look out onto the house, another run-down shed and the car park.

It would be easier to open, since it would be lower on the wall. And the top of the window would be high on the wall to help expel some hot air.  A window sill it would be the perfect spot to use an odd-shaped bit of wood our friend Lizzie B inherited recently, and wanted us to use to build something. And TJ likes the look of long vertical windows.

Disadvantages: Harder to build.  It would be exposed to the weather, so we would need to frame it up with a proper external window sill at the bottom to direct the rain away from the mud wall.  We'd need to take greater care making the frame braced and square.

The sun would come in.  In summer the sun scoots up to the north early in the day, so a narrow window won't be a very serious problem, and it wouldn't be the only thing letting in heat, but it nevertheless would add to the heat and light burden.  We'd need to create some sort of shade.

Summary / question for you


Do we value beauty or practicality in this window?

Formwork, bamboo tricks and mudding the corners

Plain ply formwork on the outside

Just when you thought it would never happen, I present for you a blog post that actually explains how to do things.  A bit.

I've been meaning to do a post on formwork.  Formwork was a feature of this weekend, so now would appear to be the time.

Winter solstice brought us one of those classic Central Victorian sunny weekends, so we made the most of it going for bush-walks and building.  This weekend we tackled some difficult bits we'd been procrastinating over.  

We also built a bit some more east wall.  Since this is one of the last simple wall sections we're going to build (yess!), it's the last chance to show the simplest formwork in action.

We start by screwing plain ply to the outside of the wall, covering as much as we think we'll build that day - that's the photo at the top of the blog post.  

Laminated chip-board door with pine plank at top

All the wall-building action goes on from inside of the building.  It's a bit of extra walking this way, but it protects the wildflowers that grow close to the walls from too much foot-traffic.

Ply on the outside, moveable formwork on the inside

The moveable formwork is made from someone's old laminated kitchen cupboard door, with a single bit of pine screwed to the top.  Laminate doesn't stick to mud.  But really you can use anything.

Once you've stuffed the bottom form with light earth mix and patted it down a bit, you're ready to slot the next panel in space.  

Isn't TJ filthy?!

Now you see why the pine board sticks up above the panel?  This prevents any gaps showing, and it's very strong.

If you want to build a lot of wall, you can pull out the bottom panel and leap-frog it up the wall for a third layer, and so on.

2nd layer slots into 1st layer

Light earth doesn't put very much pressure on the formwork (not like rammed earth or heavy poured mud) so you can get away with clamping or screwing the formwork in place.

You can remove the formwork straight away, or leave it for an hour or two to start to set.  Don't leave it in place for too long, because it needs to start drying out to prevent mould.  

When you remove the formwork, it's important to slide it off the wall, maintaining contact until you can feel the mud has let go.  If you pull the formwork straight out from the wall, some of the straw will stick and you'll lose the nice flat surface.

New mud section on East Wall

This weekend we spent most of our time fixing up some difficult sections of wall, some of which provide some interesting examples of formwork.

Before - slumping

This is the first wall we built, when we were still finding our way.

For some insane reason, I decided to put a heavy mud render cap on the top of the wall when it was still wet.

Actually I know why I did it.  At the time the verandah hadn't been built, there was no guttering and very heavy rain was forecast.   

The mud render capping helped the wall survive an extraordinary storm, but honestly, I have no idea why I didn't just cover it with a tarpaulin.

Anyhow, predictably the heavy capping caused a not very attractive slump in the wet wall.

Before - Flood damage

During the storm, a lot of mud washed out of the  wall, particularly at the top, exposing the straw and leaving it vulnerable to rot.

The capping itself started looking a bit mouldy - it was just too heavy to dry properly, and I was worried the wall below the capping would also have rotted.

Now we have a protective verandah on the west side, it was time to repair the damage and take away the stupid capping and any mouldy bits so I could pretend I got it right in the first place.

Specialised light earth cutting tools ... not.

I cut the top section of wall off using some gardening tools.  It really is amazing how Light Earth can withstand very harsh conditions, including driving rain, but be shaped with hand tools.  Of course it will be a lot more resilient to sharp objects once the render is applied.

Mouldy slumpy top removed, bamboo in place

And here we have the wall with the top taken off it.  If you squint, you can see two bamboo poles in place ready to help tie the new wall sections together and make them strong.  More on that later.

The extent of the mould damage.  Not a lot.

I was pretty amazed to find there was no rot in the wall sections that I removed.  Just a few patches of white mould that didn't seem to have damaged the straw at all.  There was no moisture for it to feed on.

Considering the length of time this wall was exposed to the weather, and the ferocious storm during that time (I think there was over 40mm of rain, which fell in sheets from the roof onto the wall), I was expecting to find at least some rot.  But none.  Mud really is extraordinary stuff. 

Once all the preparation work was done, it only took a few mixer-loads of mud and straw to top the wall up.

The wooden beam at the top doesn't go the full depth of the wall, so I was able to clamp formwork to both sides and shove the mud mix in from the top.

New light earth meets old wall

Shrinkage gap, showing bamboo pins at top

The next section of the West Wall presented some technical challenges.  

This was the second full-height wall we built, so we'd learned from our mistakes and were better prepared to fill the gap that forms at the top of the wall when it dries and shrinks.

When I built the wall, I drilled some holes into a wooden plate at the top and snipped up some bamboo garden stakes into pegs to hammer into the holes.

The pegs became partially exposed when the wall shrank, and gave me something to wrap handfuls of mud mix around.  It also connects the wall to the ceiling nicely, so it's much stronger.

This is a big improvement on the south wall, which was first full length wall, and the only one I've tried to render.  When I was trying to fill the shrinkage gap, I could feel the top of the wall move a bit, because it was only connected to the frame at the sides.  I still haven't got the gap filled properly.

When you get to the top of the wall, you have to leave a gap between the top formwork panel and the ceiling, so you can get your arms and mud mix into the cavity.

So the top section above the formwork is just a messy free-hand mud sculpture on one side.  It helps if you place the straw perpendicular to the wall, leaving a lot overhanging, then smooth it a bit flatter later with a plaster float.  But whatever you do, it will look a bit crap.

The west wall also had some tall skinny odd-shaped sections that we'd been procrastinating over, because the standard formwork doesn't fit them.  One next to the doorway, and one where the west and south walls meet. 

West wall section with gaps each side

The corner section presented a range of challenges.

Corner section. 

It's wide on the outside, but there's no room to put your hand in from the inside. So it's not like we could attach formwork to the outside and stuff light earth mix into the gap.

To add to the challenge, one of the posts is made of metal, which we didn't want to damage by screwing formwork to it.

But on the up-side, if you look closely you can see how we prepared to attach a new section of wall by leaving bits of bamboo sticking out of the adjoining wall sections.

These are held solidly in the dry wall.  

Door frame section

The spot next to the door was difficult, because the wall narrows from a double stud to a single door frame.  The bend in the wall meant I couldn't include it in the main run of wall - formwork doesn't bend.

Bamboo pegs

I repeated the trick with the holes drilled in the wood frame and hammering in some bamboo pegs, shown here.

There were already some pegs and bits of straw sticking through from the main section of wall, to help tie them together.

Dodgy formwork

We had some leftover off-cuts of laminated chip-board.

We screwed a tall skinny bit to the outside of the building to make one clean flat surface, and on the inside we screwed one small piece to the bottom of the frame, stuffed it with mud mix, then screwed or clamped another piece, and so on to the top, always leaving me enough room to shove my arm into the wall cavity and manoeuvre handfuls of mud around the bamboo pegs.

New mud meets old (drying grassy) wall

We re-used the same off-cuts on the corner section, with even more dodgy clamp work.  And le voila.

Outside showing corner section and more grass

West wall - check out the CURVES!

It was good to get those odd sections completed.  I've been pondering some of those West Wall problems for months - in fact I did a post of "west wall thought bubbles" a while back.  The solution was "bamboo!" and "don't worry if the formwork is crappy".  It just took an extra couple of months of building experience to give me the confidence to have a crack at it.

Windows and ceiling

Test-fit for windows in the East Wall

We're back, after a month away from Clydesdale.  It's good to be back, and I was  happy to see that the shed is still standing.  More than standing - it had sprouted a set of windows of its own accord!

TJ framed up the windows in a few days before I arrived, putting them in exactly the spot we chose using the "TLAR method".  So this is the first thing I saw when I arrived yesterday afternoon, and I was pretty chipper about it.

There was misty rain all day today.  It would have been miserable trying to build with mud, so instead we used the day to fix the droopy ceiling.

The ceiling is made of Solomit Strawboard, and it's one of the very few purchased new items in the shed.  Solomit is made in Western Victoria, out of wheat stalks left over after the harvest.  It smelled sensational when it arrived - like freshly mown grass, only even sweeter.  It has all sorts of thermal and acoustic insulation properties, it's non-toxic and I think it's very pretty.

But we didn't attach it using the best method, so it looked pretty ordinary.

Before - saggy ceiling

Today we sanded and oiled some 2nd hand mountain ash boards, cut them to size and screwed them to the ceiling batons from below.  They're very strong, and in some spots they've lifted the ceiling by 3cm.

After - 6 x 3m four-be-ones

It was a big deal to buy these boards, because we dragged all the other hardwood in the building out of rubbish skips on renovation sites in Melbourne.  But these boards are very visible, so I wanted them to be good quality, and not so dark they detract from the very pretty Solomit.

Next weekend if the weather lets us, we'll be mudding again.  There are five big buckets of mud mixed and waiting.  Now the window is framed up, the East Wall suddenly looks achievable!

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.