And a bath too!

For a while now, my buddies at SCPA have been encouraging us to have a working bee at our place to try to hurry along the progress a little. We've been reluctant, feeling sheepish about moving to a new town and then asking people we don't know to help us build our house. But we're feeling the pressure to get it finished, so we finally succumbed, and last week our little notice appeared in the SCPA newsletter. We're so glad we did! This weekend, 17 friends and strangers and work-colleagues and kiddies came to our place to lend a hand, meet some people and learn some stuff about building kooky little strawbale houses. It was amazing, and we felt so so happy and grateful and relieved at the amount of work we all got done! 

In the last 4 days we...

borrowed some scaffolding and sealed in the gable ends with recycled corrugated iron (from Merimbula tip), trimmed with beautiful old lichen-covered fence-palings (from freecycle),

half-built a retaining wall from recycled tyres (delivered for free from Beaurepaires) and back-filled it with about a billion wheelbarrows-full of clay (quite a lot more to do on this),

got about half of the 2nd coat of external render finished (lime/sand with a teeny bit of cement to make sure it goes off hard enough for the kids to be able to hammer it the next day without trashing the joint),

made beautiful little clay cups and collected colourful bits and pieces to make a fairy garden,

fixed up the spillway on the dam that wasn't working properly,

re-made a whole window frame that was the wrong size/shape (oops) and then re-installed it and hung the window,

dug out a hollow for the fire under our cast-iron bath (from Merimbula tip), then positioned the bath amongst some beautiful, enormous boulders down in, what will be, the veggie patch,

admired special flat-bottomed cloud-formations on the horizon over Bega,

chatted and ate and felt so so happy to be surrounded by people so willing to come help us out on a sunny winter's long-weekend.