"It feels like our little house has lost its virginity"

newly erected solar array seen through incomplete pergola

We've been living in our tiny strawbale for around 11 weeks now and up until 4 days ago we were living without electricity. You see, it was going to cost us $50,000 to connect to the grid. We were still living in Sydney when we learned this and it made us nervous. Off-grid solar? It just seemed so risky, so extreme but the 50 grand price tag helped push us through the anxiety to a place of calm acceptance. Then we moved down here and it seemed like every second person we met lived off-grid and no their batteries hadn't exploded and many of them had fridges and washing machines and tv's. All of a sudden, off-grid seemed totally banal. But in the flurry of building and getting the place in some semblance of liveability, electricity dropped down the priority list. 

Life without electricity hasn't really been that hard. But even while I say that, I'm aware that it was not so hard because we had access to electricity and could charge things up at friends' houses and at our workplaces. I don't want to get all pious "electricity, who needs it?" because that would be nauseatingly disingenuous, but it is possible to live a good life for a time without it. We got used to early nights in bed reading by headlamp, the noisy gas light and the fragrant flickering light of the many beeswax and mandarin candles we were burning. We read a lot and had very limited screen time. All good things really. But we started to yearn for music, especially as Oscy's favourite toy for a while there was a little synthesiser that played terrible versions of "Let It Be" and "Jingle Bells". Horrifyingly, the kids seemed to view this music as necessary soundtrack to their play so they'd be jumping on the trampoline or playing in the sandpit with this heinous elevator music playing all around them. Annie and I would laugh in desperation at the ridiculousness of our situation. No music but this!

Needless to say, music was the second thing we turned on, after a light, once our system was up and going. In the last four days we've been revelling in many old and new favourites so the bird and frog song on our land is now punctuated by The Decemberists, First Aid Kit, Hem, Poor Moon, Gillian Welch, Neko Case, Mumford and Sons, The National... All our old friends. Annie was so overwhelmed with joy to be hearing the Decemberists for the first time in our little house that she cried real live tears of happiness.

Will you check out that brightness?!

Most people we spoke to with off grid systems bought the components themselves but we "cheated" a little and got a custom made pre-wired system. Yes it is more expensive to do it this way. But for us science dunces, it felt like the right way to go. We spoke with Phillip at Living Power about what our power needs were - a light, a lamp, laptop, mobile phone charger, small fridge, Magimix food processor, stereo, sewing machine and he designed a 1.2kw system to meet our needs. We're still getting our heads around how to work with the system. For example, we can't let the batteries run below 70% capacity too often or else their life will be shortened. Given they are expensive and pretty nasty chemical wise, we need to prolong their life as long as possible. So we're monitoring and assessing, though we have a sneaking suspicion that Phillip is pretty good at what he does, and he has been extremely obliging and helpful, patiently answering all our (probably silly) millions of questions. 

A 1.2 kw system is not really very big. So there's a little bit of a careful balancing act at play whereby on sunny days the system gets  much more power than it can store so we need to think through our energy usage and balance it out across the day. It's amazing how even on a cloudy day we get a lot of energy. Yesterday was a semi-cloudy, little bit rainy, little bit sunny kind of a day and when we checked the batteries at sunset, they were at 102% capacity. Yeah I know, how is that possible? I'd already charged the phone and computer and the fridge had been running all day. So it showed us how much energy can be derived from a bitsa day like that. In fact, the cloudy day with a bit of blue sky can be better for solar gain as the cloud magnifies the light. How interesting is that? Tomorrow is forecast to be a partly cloudy day so I'm getting reunited with the Magimix - mushroom pate, sweet potato humous and coriander, parsley pesto anyone? 

Afternoon of solar installation, again yes, the unfinished pergola

It took three days to install. Bruno our electrician thought it would take two. But our 45 degree pitch strikes again! If you want a super-easy, super cheap build go the skillion roof but if you want cute sleeping lofts and maximum solar gain go the 45-degree pitch. Bruno told us that the 45-degree pitch, while a total bastard to work on, is optimal for capturing winter sun. Lesser pitched roofs will capture too much sun in Summer and not enough in Winter. 

We felt strange in those first couple of days of installation. Annie said she felt like our house had lost it's virginity. The beautiful galvanised roof was being covered in technology and the rough handmade walls inside were being technologised as well. In some ways we felt like we were being greedy. Electricity: did we really need it? Maybe we should do without it a bit longer? But on the final day of installation I was overcome by a really strange sensation as I pondered the fact that we would, very soon, be living off the grid. I felt all weird and nearly started crying as I contemplated the fact of getting energy from the sun. I know, I know solar power, its not new or profound. But in that moment it was something about knowing exactly where our electricity was from, that it is now and forever from the sun, and feeling so good about it, that I was practically moved to tears. 

(The cost of our solar system was $7,200 and the installation was around $1,000.)

Birthdays and DIY landscaping and re-using more old stuff

Olive and I are fully feeling the love this birthday season. A few months ago, I said that all I really wanted was to be living in our little house in time for Olive's and my birthdays. I'm not sure how many (if any) people believed this was going to happen, but I'm sure glad it did, because it's been pretty lovely. Olive's birthday started with a family viewing of sunrise from our cosy loft, followed by a visit from 11 kangaroos drenched in just-dawned sunshine, followed by presents, then pancakes cooked on our shiny new barbecue. As usual, one of the highlights of Olive's birthday morn was the unveiling of the Little Rosie Book - the birthday scrapbook I make for her each year.

This year's book was an extra-special collaborative edition, and boy is it lovely to see the things that all of Olive's most special people love most about her, and what they've observed in the past year. A whole lotta love, that's for sure.
Hot on the heels of this glorious day came my own birthday, which was also a most lovely day, not least of all because it was a Very Productive  Day (my favourite!) filled with various handmade delicious morsels and treats and an outrageous selection of very exciting books.

Top left is The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy (somewhat photo shy). All other will appear in our reading list soon!

After a spot of breakfast and some lovely birthday cuddles, the work began!
Due to the very small nature of our little home, we've always planned to have a nice, covered outside area where we can eat and cook and sit and enjoy the sunshine and general loveliness of our land. Thanks to Peps, the former slope-y quagmire/dustbowl that was immediately outside or front door has been transformed into a (relatively) expansive level bit, held up by our tyre retaining wall. As in all Peps-related activities, he did a really good job, and it's made a world of difference to the way we can get around and work on our little house.

Now that we're living here though, we were really feeling like we needed to do something about the dirt. The time had come to cover it up and make the space more beautiful and liveable.

Options for flooring an outside living space are many, but unlike some of the other decisions involved in this house-building shenanigans (insulation??!!) this decision was pretty easy. 

We had decided quite some time ago that we wanted to use recycled crushed brick instead of gravel for our outside living space. It's pretty good-looking, and ticks our re-use boxes, and it's also locally processed (apparently some dude does it using an attachment on his excavator). It's not the cheapest thing in the world, but, in addition to the aforementioned pluses, it's also pretty nice underfoot, and it's still cheaper than pavers or timber. And crikeys did it transform t he space. It now seems heaps bigger (what is with that?) and it means that we're not walking dirt and/or clay dust inside all the time. Yay and yay.

Our original plan was to gravel the whole front area in preparation for our new dining table. But then something made me think of a picture I'd gotten out of Country Style a couple of years ago and stuck into our house scrap book, of old sleepers laid directly on the ground like pavers. I really loved the look (and recycled-ness) of this, but Pearlie wasn't so keen so it went onto the backburner.

Luckily for us, there is a place in Bega that sells heaps of old timber, railway sleepers, telegraph poles and the like, so the sleeper option was again revisited and was this time met with enthusiastic approval from Pearl, who sometimes just needs a little while to get used to things.

With the combined power of me, one of my buddies from work, his ute, and our lunchbreaks, we picked up and delivered 10 ex-railway sleepers for a neat hundred bucks. Can't go wrong with that, I reckon, especially given our apparently unstoppable penchant for various recycled hardwood items.

So much character!

We laid them exactly like pavers: a bed of mostly-raked-level sand, then sleepers laid on top, with some minor adjustments to make sure they're level and even. There are a few little gaps, which we're going to fill with soil and plant out with creeping thyme, but for now we've got what kind of looks and feels like a deck, but for heaps less money and effort. Yay for saving money and effort, I say.

And what a way to spend my birthday! Nothing I like more than making stuff (aforementioned can't-believe-it's-not-a-deck, combined dunny + tool/generator storage shed) and enjoying beautiful foods and hand-crafted gifts and words of love from loved-ones near and far.

Ogga in the tool shed bit of his "toilet train" (in Oscar's world, pretty much anything is either a train or a cubby)

PLaying cubbies in the loft: Part 1

As we move closer to moving into our house I feel simultaneously overwhelmed, excited, anxious and impatient. The list of things we need to finish before we can move in grows shorter every day, yet some of those tasks that are looming ahead of us seem enormous. Take the eaves, for example. That's the little gap between the top of the wall and the bottom of the roof. I never thought about that little gap, never considered how we'd close it up, what we'd use, how it would be done. But now that Brett and I have started lining the ceiling, I'm noticing that it is quite a gap, and something will need to be done about it. But that task we will come to when the ceiling is lined. Hey - it might even get done after we move in. For now we have more pressing - and BIG - issues, namely the floor and the ceiling.

Day 3 after we made our floor, some cracks started to appear. This was not at all what we'd hoped, but it seems that even not-very-wet clay shrinks quite a bit when it dries. The cracks are everywhere. They're quite deep (around 2 inches) and about 1cm wide at the widest part. Not insubstantial, and definitely something that will need to be rectified. Some earth-floor literature suggests using a different-coloured clay slurry in cracks, giving the floor a kind of flagstone look. We're not massive fans of this look, and were really hoping to avoid it. But the thing we realised is that we, in this home-building exercise, have chosen to employ a little lady who has some of her own ideas. That little lady is Mother Earth. Unlike something like concrete, which is man-made and therefore predictable, ye olde clay is Mother-Earth made and therefore profoundly unpredictable. Take our workshop week. April was carefully chosen on account of it being (statistically speaking) one of the driest months in the Bega Valley. But do you think Mother Nature gives a rats arse about statistics? No way Jose. And to prove it, she flogged down on our uncovered bales, just to keep us on our toes. Did we learn? No way Jose! We thought we knew what to expect with this freshly-dug-from-the-earth clay we made our floor from, but we were wrong. Good thing we have a sense of humour.

In this photo you can see the double layer batts - thin eh? -a couple of the floor cracks and a space person. Leftover bits of hardwood were used to make sure the floor wasn't damaged by the ladder, though it's definitely hard enough to walk on without leaving marks.

Just to be a little different and try out something new for a change, we have decided to fill our cracks with wax. Reasons? I believe it will be easier to fill them up most thoroughly with something liquid, it dries pretty hard and fast, and it might look a little less like flag-stones than if we use clay. But that is a task we will complete after the ceiling is finished. 

Yesterday Brett and I started insulating and cladding the inside of our lofty roof-space. Let's just say it was not the funnest job in the world, and leave it at that (though Brett did say he felt like we were "playing cubbies"up in the loft with a view of the tree-tops, eating chocolate in what looked for all intents and purposes to be some kind of elaborate dress-ups).

Space person in the cubby/space ship nailing up the super-shiny mini-orb

Choosing insulation was a major, confusing, exhausting and ultimately inconclusive pain in the arse. So much information, so many salespeople, so much well-intentioned advice. While insulation should always be a big issue, not to be taken lightly, in a strawbale house it's even more so. The walls, you see, are rated to be something like R20. Your average housing batts are something like R3, if you're lucky. I read once that if you build a strawbale house and don't insulate the roof properly, it's basically like building a really expensive chimney. 

The problem for us with our little strawbs is that the roof space, where we're s'posed to cram tons of excellent insulation, is where we're going to be sleeping. In total, we had about 12cm to fill with insulation. We needed bang for our buck, and bang for the minimal space. What we settled on is a special kind of compressed bulk insulation that is 85% recycled glass, which is spun into fibres and bonded with a glue that is, well, not exactly natural. It's normally used in industrial applications, and we had to order it direct from the manufacturer as it isn't available through any retailers. It wasn't cheap ($2000 for the whole roof), but this was one area we weren't prepared to skimp on. We wanted high performance and high recycled content, while still keeping within the constraints dictated by our tiny roof space. These batts are 5cm thick, so we doubled them, bringing the total to 10cm and, combined with the anticon blanket that is attached under our corrugated iron, we have an R rating of 3.9. Pretty good given the circumstances. In other situations, with other rooflines, Frank uses whole strawbales as roof insulation, creating what he calls an 'esky'. I love this, in theory, and was keen to give it a go, but the roof needs to specially engineered for an application like this, and when we priced trusses for this roof they came in around 3 times the amount we paid, and we wouldn't have had a loft space.

We're lining the ceiling with some mini-orb (mini profile corrugated iron) that I got at Eden tip for about $15 (the savings offset the price of the insulation). Score! But boy oh boy does it need to be painted. That stuff is shiny: at the moment it feels a little less like a cozy lofty treehouse and a little more like a crazy space-pod. Especially in my fibreglass-proof safety suit, goggles, and breathing apparatus.

Mud and blood*

* This blog post has pictures of blood-related activities. If you're likely to be grossed out, maybe get a friend to read it to you so you don't have to see the photos.

Last friday Pearl and I spent the day together, just the 2 of us, for the first time in what seems like a very long time. We chatted, ate take-away hamburgers sitting on strawbales in the sun, and finished the third and final coat of render in the little house we're building. 

Like Pearl said, it was 'kinda like a date', but instead of going to see a movie or a band, we were building a house for our family. Pretty nice.

Pearl on our 'date' adding final beautifulness to our clay walls

The third coat was on a deadline as it had to be done before we started on our earth floor, which was slated for a sunday working bee. And boy were we busy little bees!

Just like convicts, but with head-scarves and rainbow legwarmers

I don't remember exactly when I decided that I was really keen on having an earth floor, but I do remember when I decided I wanted to use blood in it. I was reading The Straw Bale House. Unlike many books about natural building, this book actual has a half-decent discussion of earthen floor techniques, though it is sadly lacking in technical instruction. Still, from reading it I learned that in many traditional Native American  societies, earth-floor-making was women's work, and blood - usually ox blood - makes an earthen floor REALLY hard. 

Sold.

Most things you read, and most people you talk to about earth floors will talk about a poured earth floor - mix up a slurry of clay and/or cement and/or soil and/or sand and/or manure and pour it in wet, the same way you would concrete. Then wait about a million years for it to dry out, in the mean time trying not to worry about the enormous cracks that may or may not form in the shrinking floor material. This always seemed a little stressful to me. Furthermore, a friend who'd house-sat a house with a poured earth floor had commented that it was "like living in a quarry". Ummm… not really the look/feel we're after with our little bothy. Not to mention the fact that we really need to move into our little house as soon as we can - 6 weeks + drying time just isn't an option.

I knew there had to be something better, but finding information about earth floors - poured or otherwise - is pretty bloody tricky.

But then I came across this blog, which inspired me to start adding 'rammed earth floors' to my search parameters. I still came up with bugger all, but I learned enough to cobble together a method, used both in Japan and Europe, involving a pounded or rammed earth floor which is soaked in blood and then sometimes sealed with oil or wax. I discussed this method with Frank and, with his seal of approval, decided to go ahead and make it happen.

Brett rakes in the first 20 wheelbarrow-loads of clay. Our 24 square metre floor took 40 wheelbarrows and a few buckets of clay

Enter the working bee! Friends from near and far (including new blog-met friends Holly and Chris, who have, amazingly, played a gig in a Scottish bothy in their pyjamas) once again rocked up to lend a hand barrowing and bucketing and raking and stomping and sledge-hammering and whacker-packering and blood-painting our clay floor.

Annie and Chris adding to and stomping down the first layer

The blood was obtained from our friendly local organic meat providore, who supplied us with a 20L bucket of steer blood for $20. Pretty reasonable, I thought. Problem was, by the time we came to actually use the blood it was… well… kind of congealed. The problem with congealed blood is that the bits that do the congealing - the platelets - are actually the bits you want in your floor, making it hard. Luckily for us, we had my dad's paint mixer drill attachment handy, so we whipped up a bit of a blood smoothie, and were on our way.

Mmmm... blood smoothie

Yep, it was kind of gross. Yep, it smelled kind of yuk. Yep, it was surreal, and horror-movie-like, and funny, all at the same time.

Yes folks - it's blood. In a kiddie bucket

I suspect that the clay, which we had whacker-packered to within a fraction of a millimetre of its life, was actually a little too wet, and so didn't soak up as much blood as I would have liked. The moisture content of the clay was somewhat mediated by the dry clay (left over from rendering) we had to sprinkle on to stop the whacker-packer from sticking to and lifting up the floor, but the texture, when we all excitedly removed our shoes and walked all over it, was still a little bit like firm plasticine. 

Chris and Holly filling in the low bits, while the whacker-packer has a bit of a lie down. The edges and corners were done by hand, using a sledgehammer and a bit of hardwood left over from the top plate

Our heels sunk in a bit if we weren't careful, but it really was a beautiful feeling, and I love the gentle undulations in the floor. Let's face it - a dead-level floor in our wonky little house would look pretty weird, but we were all pretty impressed with our eyeballing when we set the straight-edge on it and saw that it was actually reasonably level.

The finished floor, just as the whacker-packer ran out of petrol

The blood was applied with a broom and a strange, foam-covered trowel my dad had given us (maybe used for tiling?). We applied it in 2 coats, (the second by torch-light) to let each soak in as much as possible.

Holly ain't scared of no blood broom

Now, we wait. When Pearl deems it dry enough (I am notoriously impatient) we will seal it with a blend of linseed oil, citrus solvent and beeswax, and then we'll be done!

In the spirit of our entire building journey thus far, our floor-making was a massive learning curve for all of us, involving much head scratching, collaborative problem solving and exclamations of "I think I read somewhere...". When I checked on the floor this morning it was looking pretty good (albeit a little gruesome on account of some still-not-dried blood bits) with no sign of cracking or disintegration or, as Brett had predicted, foxes with their tongues stuck to the floor. Time will tell how the whole thing wears. We're going to glue old carpet to the bottom of all our furniture, and implement a 'no shoes' rule. I'm also making an enormous plaited rag rug, just in case, but I feel safe knowing that we've essentially done what millions of people have been doing for thousands of years (OK - minus the whacker-packer) and made their home from the earth around them.

In addition to the $20 for the blood, we spent about $150 on gravel for the sub-floor drainage layer.

bring on the rain

How funny to think that only 4 weeks ago we were coming to the end of our strawbale-building workshop, having spent almost a whole week wishing and hoping for the rain to stop falling. It's funny because now, we're thinking "bring on the rain!". We now have a driveway and a water tank and an almost-finished drain out the back of the little house and a sweet little duck dam just waiting for some water and some ducks. We're feeling ready. Ready-er than we have been since the bulldozer first made a cut on the grassy slope, only a couple of months ago. Exciting times! When we were building we'd lie in bed feeling anxious as the rain fell down but we knew that when our water tank was in place we'd be overjoyed to hear the rain. That day is now, and will be forever more, as we will soon be entirely reliant on the rain for our water. 

The water tank we chose was plastic. It was a huge decision for us, with months spent weighing up embodied energy, life expectancy, health issues, maintenance and that ever-present factor: cost. Having read Milkwood's characteristically thorough account of their very own deliberation, we knew that stainless steel was probably our ideal choice (though I was quite uneasy about the embodied energy). 

But the cost, aside from anything else, made them totally out of the question for us. Next up, plastic vs corrugated iron. We were leaning towards corrugated iron mostly because we like the look of it, and we were quite into the idea of having a tank that matched our roof. But they're quite a bit more expensive, and they're lined with plastic anyway, so the quality of our water wouldn't really be any different. They're also a bit trickier to install, and need a more engineered base, rather than just a sand pad, which is what the plastic tank sits on. Having a seriously limited budget, we were very concerned about not being able to finish the place at all, so were perhaps a little more swayed by cost than we would have liked. So we ended up getting plastic, with a view to getting a small stainless steel, for drinking water, if and when our budget allows. We also have a few very large glass water containers (some variety of flagon, perhaps?), so may rig up some kind of water-catchment that runs directly into these, and we'll be getting a charcoal and ceramic water filter, for what it's worth.

Those strawbales sure are handy buggers...

Our plastic tank came on the back of a truck, late in the day. It was much bigger than I had expected (3.7 metre diameter) and much bigger than the 3 metre sand pad our friend Brett and I had lovingly prepared. But the truck-driver happily helped us expand the pad, and within half an hour or so we were ready to unload. All 500kg of it. See the strawbale at the end of the truck? That's to stop the thing rolling right off the end and bulldozing our little house. It was kind of scary!! We rolled it to the end of the truck, spun it round a bit then just pushed it off the back of the truck onto the sand. Seemed kind of crazy/precarious/dangerous to me, but apparently that's the way it's done.

It doesn't look so enormous now that it's in place, but there is definitely a sense that it's quite big compared to our little house. And yes, it is bigger than the tank recommended by the ATA's tankolator website, but we figured it was better to have too big than too small. I don't want no overflow coming out of that tank.

We joked as the driver left us, that he'd be in the pub in Cooma that night exclaiming "Those bloody hippies in Bega - got a tank bigger than the bloody house!". Almost true. But we figure when (if?) we get our stainless steel tank, we can cut a door in it and it'll make a handy spare bedroom for guests.

Cost of the tank was $1700 (delivered) for a 22 500 litre tank.

Clay fun on a cold and windy day

This morning we ventured to our land, and our little unfinished straw bale, as a family. For the first time in two weeks, it was just us. 

It was a freakishly cold and windy day and I guess we wondered, is this a portent of winter to come? Yes it was windy on that hill but inside our little strawbs we felt pretty secure, snug and warm. We started the day with the modest aim of finishing the first layer of clay render on the back interior wall. We almost made it until Oscar, in a fit of enthusiasm, tipped the water out and we had no more water to make more render. By that time, the sun was getting low on the far hill, our arms were aching and we decided to call it a day with a necessary detour home via Coles for  ice cream and red wine. 

With a healthy clay render, everyone can be involved.

It felt odd working on our home, just the four of us. Odd and good at the same time. Oscar noticed the absence of a collective with his plaintive cry, "All the people, gone... all the people, gone.."Annie and I wondered how we'd go working on the house, just us with our little kids. People warned us it would be hell. But actually, it was fun. Productivity was low to medium but still, we felt like we'd all contributed and clay rendering is just so damn satisfying! I'm sure there's a beautiful analogy somewhere there about the joy derived from building a handmade house from the earth. Also you can't really get much more kid friendly than clay rendering, so kids are all hands on for the inside, though the outside render involves lime and a bit of cement (to make it weather proof) so is less for the kiddies' involvement. We're on the first layer, with two more layers to go, so rough and cracked is a-ok. Some little kiddy inscription just adds character and will actually help with the application of the subsequent layers by providing a 'key' for the 2nd and 3rd layers to attach to.

Annie working hard on the tricky window areas

Always time for snotty kisses

The noticeable absence of a collective today provided us with a moment to pause and reflect on the awesome and mammoth effort that got us to where we were today. Really, it's overwhelming to think about the love and generosity and fine assistance we have been showered with these past weeks. So next up must be a roll call of thanks. But for now, it's ice cream and wine and fruit stewing on the stove with vanilla bean... and maybe, hopefully, completing the paint removal from the old windows and french doors we are using in this little straw bale... Golly gosh they are beautiful! Don't fret, windows and doors to feature in a future post.

Annie, a little bit Deadwood today

Cost of clay, lime and cement for internal and external render was $2700. Most of that was the clay, which is annoying, given the amount we found on site when we excavated. At least we'll know for next time!

" I love our little house! I don't want to live anywhere else!"

Thus spoke Pearl as our first truss was lifted into position and we caught our first glimpse of our beautiful little hand-made home. Indeed, it is a glorious sight, and pretty much wiped out the memory of the last few days' tears and fretting and nervous tummies.

This morning, after the fog lifted, we saw blue blue skies. We rejoiced, we did good weather dances, we hurriedly ate our porridge so we could get to the land and assess the damage. Frank brought his moisture-meter and we tested all the bales to see if any needed replacing due to water damage. The internationally-recognised theshold for safe moisture levels in building bales is 19%. Most of ours were pretty good, but we had one pesky one, in the top row, that was testing around 20%. Luckily for us we didn't have to totally dismantle any walls, and Frank was able to just pop out the 'infected' bale using his enormous strawbale mallet (affectionately known as "the pursuader") without even moving the top plate. We felt pretty good. I'm pretty sure all of us had at one time or another considered the prospect of having to rebuild entire walls due to damaged bales, so to get away with only replacing one was super!

Our reading of strawbale books had led us to believe that strawbales could not get wet AT ALL. Many a strawbale book and article told us: "moisture is a strawbale house's worst enemy!". That is true, but not the extent we had assumed. According to Frank (and let's face it - if you can't trust Frank on these matters, who can you trust?) strawbales can get a little bit wet on the outside of the bales, but not at all moist at the 'heart' of the bale. This is the bit we tested with the moisture-meter. The water-shedding capacity of our bales was also aided by the fact that they have been laid on edge, meaning that the cut edge of the bale is hidden within the wall, and the exposed edges act kind of like a thatched roof, shedding the water off rather than sucking it up like a straw.

We very quickly completed all our walls, and manhandled the top plate into position - including a 5-person uphill tug-of-war to move the massive thing 20mm to make it perfect - all before lunch!

Spirits were high as the sun shone on our quick progress, and immediately after lunch we lifted the first truss into position. You will notice the trusses are blue. This is because they're made of treated pine. Getting pre-fab trusses was something we were always going to have to do. With no building experience, and no money to pay someone to build a properly-framed roof, pre-fab trusses were our only option. And you know what? We're pretty fine with that, not least of all because it meant we were able to get our roof up in one day today, especially given the precarious weather conditions. Our trusses have a very wide bottom chord, which will act as the bearers for the floor of our sleeping loft. They were especially engineered for us to make the most of that roof space while still being structurally sound (obviously) but also aesthetically pleasing. Our roof pitch is 45 degrees, which is a tad unusual in Australia on account of us not having to shed snow from our roofs all that frequently. Some people also think it looks a bit funny. And while I do concede that our house looks rather like a gingerbread cottage, and also rather like the kind of house a 4 year old would draw, we love it to bits and wouldn't have it any other way.

All this rain we've been having has really made a HUGE deal of the whole roofing exercise. Now our strawbales are safe from thunderstorms and rain, which is a relieving thing indeed. It was also lovely to see our little house take shape - no amount of whiz-bang CAD pictures could possibly compare to seeing the little "gingerbread cottage" taking shape on our very own block of land. And the love!! I know I've mentioned it before, but seriously - it's astounding! Especially given the circumstances. So much rain... so much sticky mud. People are showing up every day with their hearts and their bodies geared towards helping us build our dream. It's overwhelming, really. And even people we barely know are pitching in, bringing us meals and baked treats for the hungry hoards.

Morag, Frank and Matt spent much of today atop our top plate, which is no mean feat given it's about 9 feet off the ground.

This gave me the heebie jeebies as I'm really not keen on heights - I forced myself up a ladder today to help attach one of the trusses but was really quite useless on account of not being able to let go enough to use the hammer. So to see all our dear ones fairly trotting along the top-plate carrying all manner of heavy items really reinforced the feeling of love we have for this whole project.

As the roof went up today, Morag asked me, "Do you love your little house?" and I replied, "I do, but I love you more". And it's true! To build a house with someone, to pitch in and do all the multitude of tasks both big and small that make up a house-build, is really something, and I hope against hope that one day I can return the favour, not just to the people who have helped us this week, but to anyone who needs it.

Today was supposed to be the last day of our workshop, so tomorrow we're losing some of our workforce as those who had traveled to be with us return home. But some are staying on, and many locals have offered to give us a hand with the rendering, which is our next big job.

The rain is supposed to stay away for the next couple of days, which would be lovely, though there is slightly less urgency now that the trusses are up and tomorrow we'll have a proper roof over our precious 4 walls.

Cost of the trusses was $2500.

Day 2 = wet

We returned home this evening with heavy hearts and very soggy, muddy feet. Today, day 2 of our strawbale building adventure, the rain came down. We frantically covered and uncovered the bales as each burst of rain came down, and sheltered under whatever random piece of building material we could find.

Our uber-clay soil was very soon transformed into a slippery mush, and a last-minute path of gravel was laid so we could get around the building site semi-safely (seriously, that shit is slippery!).

The kiddies, meanwhile, rejoiced in their new textural playground.

Rain during construction was by far my biggest, if not my only, reservation about load-bearing strawbale construction. Non-load bearing strawbale houses get their structural supports and roof first, so all the bales can be stacked safely out of the weather. This was very appealingly safe-sounding to me, and I was always more inclined towards this method of building. But when we decided to build our tiny 'practise' house first, we realised that the size of it (6x4 metres + loft) meant that it made heaps more sense for it to be load bearing. We decided to take the gamble, and today we paid the price for our risk.

We did get a small amount of work done today though, in between huddling under the little lunch marquee,

and managed to get 2 of the walls stacked to roof height, and part of the top-plate on, but it wasn't nearly as much as we had anticipated. But we are learning so much! And still managing to have some fun, though I must admit that today was probably one of the most stressful days of my whole life. I don't get why people feel the need to do extreme sports for an adrenaline rush - just build a load-bearing strawbale house in the rain for some excitement in your life!

We also received our roof trusses (and finally got a feel for how big our sleeping loft will be),

our roof insulation (no conflict!), roofing iron, guttering and ridge-capping and our clay and lime (we ordered the clay before we realised what our entire block was made of - oops). The clay came on the back of a truck that had no unloading device, so we had to unload all 72 x 20kg bags of clay and 55 x 20kg bags of lime by hand. But we started a little chain gang-type line and got them unloaded and re-stacked pretty quickly!

As I write this, our spirits have lifted, thanks to some stew, warm spiced cider and cake, and we are all trying to ignore the sound of the rain falling heavily on our roof. My thoughts though, are with our strawbale walls, excruciatingly close to being finished enough to put up the roof, but for now protected only by a few strategically tacked tarps.

I can only imagine the state of our driveway tomorrow - we had 2 cars stuck in the quagmire today, which were pulled out, by hand, by the burly blokes on the worksite. As Pearl says though, there is nothing we can do about the weather. If our build isn't complete (or not as complete as we would have liked) by the end of this week, we'll just have to work it out. And I know we will. And at least, at the very very worst, we'll have a whole heap of wet straw to use in our veggie garden beds.

Total cost of strawbales, fencing wire, and gripples (for compression of the bales and securing them to the bottom plate and each other) was $1400. Ironically this is the biggest part of our building, but the cheapest!

Apprentice to the apprentice

It's pretty hard to describe the feeling and emotions going on in our house at the mo, being as we are 2 days out from the workshop. It's crazy levels of all hands on deck.

Pearly's writing shopping lists and menu plans and making sure kids are happy and fed and at least partially clothed!I'm pretending that I don't actually work full time, and utilising every second of my lunch-break to pick up second-hand building materials obtained on freecycle, and finalising and confirming orders and deliveries over email so my boss doesn't hear me on the phone. Louisa's trying to get snippets of work done in between looking after kiddies and cooking delicious dinners. And Morag, well, Morag's kind of making it all happen, receiving orders of sand and gravel at the land, chasing window-framing timber all around town and, tonight, teaching me how to make window bucks and frames. Morag's immense helping-ness is actually kind of freaking me out, because I'm looking at everything she's doing for us, and I'm thinking that if she wasn't here I'd be doing it by myself, and that thought is, quite frankly, terrifying.

The window bucks are the rough frames that are inserted into the strawbale walls as they're put up, and then the proper window frames are fixed into these. The window bucks are made from treated pine, and are then covered in render, so you don't see them. Yes, I know treated pine isn't at all great, and doesn't really fulfil our non-toxic ambitions, but you know what? Sometimes you just have to make a pragmatic compromise, and a small amount of treated pine timber used for framing up our windows is one of our compromises. Especially at this stage in the game, with the beginning of the workshop looming and a list a mile long still needing to be attended to, I'm pretty cool with using ye olde treated pine. It's so soft to drill!

So last night and tonight were spent measuring and cutting (with big, fancy tools like mitre saws!) and drilling and screwing together our window bucks. It was pretty exciting, after we got over a few false starts involving incorrect measurements and me cutting on the wrong side of the line. Morag is an excellent instructor, and was very patient and encouraging with me, even when I clearly did not have any clue what I was doing. Yet another reminder that, as much as I fantasise about actually living in the middle of nowhere and actually building my own house all by myself, a house built under those circumstances would probably be pretty crap.

It was interesting for me to observe the way that I, the untrained seamstress, differed from Morag, the carpentry apprentice, in my approach to measuring the timber sizes. In the same way as I built the chicken house at our old place in Sydney,

my inclination is to always measure things as if I'm going to stitch them together. Morag quickly showed me that this was not an approach to take with carpentry, especially when it's going into a building that has to be, well, kind of square. I was familiar with the disastrousness of not-square buildings from reading A Place of My Own by Michael Pollan, so was keen to avoid anything of the sort in our own little house. I took Morag's lead and measured to the millimetre. Thing is, when you're using big cutting machines with blade a mill thick, you wanna make sure you cut on the right side of the bloody line! learned that lesson a couple of times... pretty sure I'm good with it now.

In addition to the fancy electric tools we also made use of other quality tools like ugg boots (in lieu of clamps) and iphones (in lieu of a calculator or skills in mental arithmetic).

The windows and doors to be encased by these newly-made bucks are many and varied, originating from side-of-the-road council clean-ups (federation era bay window re-made into double casements and a gorgeous set of solid French doors), gifts from friends (wonderful art deco leadlight) and one of my mumma's trips to the op-shop (unusual and gorgeous tiny leadlight). The photo below shows some of our completed bucks, braced diagonally to keep them square, and some of the stripped federation side-of-the-road windows, which Morag and I picked up about 2 years ago.

There have been many hours spent stripping the paint off these mongrels, a task I would shudder to attempt without the aid of my trusty Bahco paint scraper. This was recommended to me by my boss, who is an almost bottomless font of knowledge of all things building-related, and very keen on drawing diagrams to accompany his advice, much to my amusement and appreciation. He told me that this tool, because of it's awesome ergonomics and efficiency "makes scraping fun. Almost". Quite the caveat, but true nonetheless.

Now that they're almost stripped, I'm quite pleased, and think it was definitely worth the work, though a couple of them need some repairs given that the million layers of paint were apparently the only thing holding them together. No worries though. I soon made friends with Builder's Bog, and will be fixing the windows as soon as the frames are done and time allows (cue guffaws of laughter here).

But seriously. We're now at the stage where we can actually say that, this time next week we'll be able to stand inside our little strawbale home and look out those windows, after having spent a week building it with some of our nearest and dearest, and a few new friends as well. I can't imagine what that will feel like, but I guess we're soon going to find out!

For those of you who are interested in what we're spending on this adventure, additional framing timber for the windows has set us back $350, and the sand (for rendering) and gravel (to fill the bottom plate) was $400.