On being a bit silly about potential water-catchment

In the last 24 hours we've had just over 80mm of rain. Not exactly flood material (though the river is up, Pearl happily reported when she arrived home), but as anyone who's depended on tank and/or dam water will tell you, it's pretty great. Ducks are happy, snails are happy (grrr), garden's happy, newly-planted 800 shelter-belt trees are happy. And pretty much every conversation I've had in the last day or so has involved at least a little bit of "how good's the rain!?", and/or excited comparisons of mm's fallen into different friends' rain gauges around the traps. The excitement (and relief) around town is palpable, and kind of nice.

Olive and I took advantage of the situation by designating today a 'reading day', which comprised much lolling in the loft finishing various novels, eating scrambled duck eggs, drinking tea, and peeking out the window intermittently to admire the rain. 

loft-view of rainy rain over the valley

It also involved a couple of mad dashes outside in raincoats and gumboots to check on the situation with our overflowing duck dam.

One problem with living in a climate where it doesn't rain that often, is that sometimes when it rains quite a bit, you're not prepared. This of course, is very silly: the less rain you get, the more prepared you should be to catch the rain when it does fall. In some ways, we do OK with this. Our tank is slightly larger than the tank recommended by the quite handy tankulator site, for our tiny roof catchment. When I was researching tank size, I figured it'd be better to have a tank that's never completely full than a tank that ever overflows. So far, we've been lucky in that our tank is big enough to catch all the heavy rain that falls, so we can take advantage of it in dry spells.

The little duck dam (OK, OK... It's kind of more of a pond..) on the other hand, is way way way too small for the catchment it has. The duck dam receives water off the road, which is caught by our driveway and an under-the-road-culvert and delivered into the swale that runs through the orchard, which in turn runs into the dam. This is great, and it means we catch a lot of water when it rains even a little bit. But the dam isn't big enough to hold it all. After rain like we've had today, I suspect it's maybe only a third as big as it needs to be to take advantage of rainfall like this, let alone anything more substantial.

poor little overflowing duck dam (with rivulets of road-water and happy snail-foraging ducks) as seen from the loft

Part of the reason for this kind of significant and stupid oversight was the fact that the main purpose for the dam was to get the earth for our floor, and so that's what I was mostly thinking about when it was dug. I (foolishly) wasn't concentrating properly on the road, the culvert, the swale, and the amount of water all these things would deliver into our poor little dam. Not that I have a one track mind or anything...

I can't even tell you how frustrating it is to see a dam overflowing water that I know we'll desperately need in 2, 4 or 6 months time. Not to mention kind of stressful when the rain is rushing into the dam at such a rate that the spillway can't cope and water starts flowing over the dam wall. The obvious answer is, of course, to extend the dam, but that's easier said than done, mostly because it will involve a fair chunk of money and getting an excavator out to do it. But it will be done, sooner rather than later, especially given that people are saying it'll be a wet Spring... Though people also said that about Winter and it didn't really happen.

So I hope you, dear reader will learn from our mistake: carefully consider your catchment  before you build a dam or pond even  if you're simultaneously thinking about something exciting like an earth floor. Especially if there's a road involved. Those buggers catch a hell of a lot of water.

one month in

It's been a little more than a month now since we moved into our little strawbale home, so we thought it was time for a little reflection on the things that we've learned and are still learning about home building and living on the land.

Probably the most surprising thing has been just how liveable (dare we say 'spacious'?) the place actually is. It's just on 24 square metres. Just so you know, the size of the average house being built in Sydney these days is around 300-400 square metres. So it's small. It's one room, with a loft. But it has everything we need, and still room for toys and books and fun stuff like that. And we haven't even built our undercover outdoor kitchen-y bit yet. We're feeling really good about keeping things small, though Pearl is missing having a kitchen (new birthday books like The Gourmet Farmer Deli Book aren't really helping on this front). Yes it's true, Pearl can feel her fingers aching for some baking action or some handmade cheese action but none of this is possible with our current bare bones infrastructure. However, on the up, we will be building a wood-fired cob oven sometime soon and so we anticipate some great baking days ahead. Also the delay on having a home with a proper kitchen is a good thing in terms of having the time and space to really think through what our kitchen should entail - mega-pantry and cold store anyone? Special room for hanging handmade smallgoods? Oh yeah....

Annie is still not totally over the floor debacle, and it seems that our 'flagstones' are still shrinking, so the puttying/grouting/filling task remains ongoing. The rug (complete with springy, freecycled underlay!) in the 'loungeroom' helps things, and Annie is slowly working on a braided and coiled rag rug, so it's not all bad. In fact, Annie is pretty sure that if the whole thing hadn't been such a bitter disappointment, she probably wouldn't even notice it. She just doesn't cope well with failure. But it's OK! It's been a learning experience, and we've definitely made note of the things we'll do differently next time (yes, we will be making another earth floor when we build again) like not using any bagged clay and making a more sturdily rammed substrate using something like road base. We'll probably also do a cob floor, rather than rammed.

We're all completely in love with our sleeping loft. We probably always thought it'd be a nice cosy place, but it's far surpassed expectations. It is beautiful. The sunrise/sunsets are beautiful, the Bermagui-oiled ancient floorboards are beautiful, the fence-palings are beautiful and the view is freaking amazing. And yeah - it's comfy and cosy as well. We actually don't know that I'll be rushing into having a bedroom any time soon, so enamoured with the loft are we.

We're really pleased with how the lime-washing has stabilised the clay walls. When it was just clay it was a little dusty, but the lime-wash seems to have bound it all together. It's also just so beautiful and light.  We love the bale walls, perhaps more than we thought, and can safely say that we are absolute card-carrying strawbale devotees and would not even consider any other type of building. Not that we're absolutist or anything... 

No but seriously, this little straw bale is just so comfy temperature wise. When we were building, and people asked us what kind of heating we'd have, our answer of "We're not having heating - it's a passive-solar-designed strawbale house - we won't need it" was inevitably met with chuckles (read:"damn hippies don't know what they're talking about"), wry, knowing smiles, or comments like "Ah... you've never lived through a Bega winter, have you...". 

So relentless were such responses that we actually started doubting our little building before it was even finished, and started looking around for a little wood stove or some such. But, even though we moved in here in Wintertime when the night time temperatures get down below zero and we wake up and see frost all around, in our little strawbs with the old (ie. non-double glazed) curtainless windows, we have been quite snug without a fire or any form of heating. Is that not amazing?

The land itself continues to delight us, and has shown us some quite lovely little surprises in the form of stunningly rich black soil with crazy-good water-holding capacity and a spring-fed dam, which is a major asset. We are, of course, still discovering it all, and expect more surprise and excitement as the days go by..... Seeing how happy our kids are here on our land has been so heartwarming. It's like the physical space has allowed their imaginations to soar and they spend so many hours immersed in amazing play scenarios together and alone. We're seeing new sides to both of them as they embark on new adventures and journeys and discover their new world.

We still have so much to do. The coming weeks' to do list looks something like this: finish the outside lime render, instal more fence paling sealing inside, build a covered pergola over our dining room, paint, instal solar system, finish kid's cubby, slash grass, get ducks, build fences, get chickens, mulch kids play area, prepare the ground for the 850 trees we are planting as part of a windbreak/wildlife corridor, continue to plant out our first veg and herb garden, start to plan our first food forest garden, plant citrus, olives, pomegranates, almonds and avocadoes,  make some decisions re livestock... Oh and on it goes.... But now we're here, actually here on our land it all feels very possible and really pretty fun.

On move-in eve

It seems unreal. The last week's flurry of night-time, last-minute painting-and-finishing by torchlight is finally over and we're sitting here for the last night in Vickie's lovely warm house drinking wine and thinking "wow: Tomorrow we're in". Sure, tomorrow will be a 'soft' move-in. Mostly just our bed into the freshly-painted loft, a chest of drawers to store our basic essentials and, if we get to it, maybe a couch. There is still a bit to do - painting and finishing-off, mostly, and a whole lot of tidying up and arranging.

Freshly Porter's-painted recycled corrugated iron, hardwood fence-palings and beautifully oiled wide boards.

Last night, I sealed the floor with our Bermagui oil - a combination of beeswax, citrus-based solvent and linseed oil. It's the same oil we used on our upstairs loft floorboards, and while they turned out quite beautifully, our debacle of an earth floor still leaves a lot to be desired. Yes, it cracked. Quite a lot. At first, we filled the cracks with cement, but then the cement cracked. We spent a heartbreaking few days trying to reconcile ourselves with ripping the whole thing up and concreting it. This was quite devastating for us, and more than a few tears were shed as we faced this reality. The compromise was about much more than the question of the embodied energy of concrete. It was about the work that had been put into that floor by so many people. It was about our vision of what a beautiful earthen floor could be. It was about using natural, mother-earth-made materials from our very own neck of the woods. It was about softness underfoot. It was about saving money. And it was about pride. More than a few people had told us we'd be better off with concrete, so digging up our earth floor and replacing it, before we'd even moved in was going to involve a big bit of word-eating.

But after some sage counsel from our beloved hostess Vickie, a few words from Leonard Cohen courtesy of beautiful Nessie, we realised that the floor is functional, and it is there, and, while it is significantly less beautiful than we first envisaged, we've decided to rug it up and live with it. 

Thank goodness for the recent rug-making workshop!

The cracks have now been sturdily filled with a mixture of bondcrete and river sand. Some of the cracks were pretty hefty, so they got a pre-fill with swept-in sand, then bondcrete was poured in on top, then the whole lot was dusted with sand. There are still a few gaps (the worst cracks were more than an inch wide and probably 3 inches deep - right down to the gravel substrate) but it's good enough to work with.

Yep, it's hideous. But it feels nice under foot and it'll store heat when the sun hits it so it's gonna stay.

On this building journey, I have learned that when you are a home builder who doesn't really know what you're doing, products like bondcrete, liquid nails, expanding foam and caulked-in gap fillers are, while decidedly unnatural, pretty much your best friends. I'm cool with that. The bondcrete has worked wonders as a floor-crack filler, and it's allowed us to make a pretty buggered-up floor into a functional floor and, while it's still a little painful for us to look at now, we know that in a few months' time when it's covered in hand-made rugs and furniture and toys and books, and our spring garden is flourishing and our little cottage is filled with all our beautiful pictures and treasures, we're probably not going to be thinking too much about it.

Old-school brand-stamping. We just couldn't paint over it.

Ring the bells that still can ring

Forget your perfect offering

There's a crack in every thing

That is how the light gets in.

Floor schmoor

Ok ok so we are not so happy with our floor. It's not a failure, exactly, but it is a disappointment.. We had a vision of a luscious deep red brown smooth smooth earthen floor. We seem to have ended up with an insipidly brown, cracked thing called a floor. It is very cracked, which is far from unusual for an earthen floor. In fact many people make a feature of this and go for the flagstone look. This is not the look we were wanting, however it's the look we currently have. Check out that crazy stone paver look. Yeah, it's not so great. 

But we have a plan. We've patched the cracks with a lime/cement render (we seem to have A LOT of bags of cement/lime/clay left. Any takers?). And now we're gonna paint it. And yes it feels a little like cheating. Porters Paints have some very lovely low-VOC/No-VOC paints . We're quite taken by Sea Otter, though we think it's hilarious that there's a colour called Ox Blood. Almost like they're teasing us about our floor failure. 

We had thought that utilising the rammed earth approach would minimise cracking. We knew that our soil was a rich clay soil, perfect for floor-making however we were nervous about doing a poured earth floor on account of the length and unpredictability of the drying period. As we've mentioned we used the soil that had been dug from our top/future duck dam and given it had been sitting there for many weeks we figured it was probably quite dry. The Bega Valley has had very little rain for a few months now, actually the last big rain was the week of our straw bale building workshop in April. Oh the hilarity! Anyhoo we thought the clay would be fairly dry, however as soon as we got down below the surface we realised it was still very moist. Now this water holding capacity is a great thing, a truly great thing when it comes to our garden and orchard and general land productivity. But maybe, just maybe a rammed earth floor requires clay soil that is less moist. Our thinking is that less moist could equate to less unpredictability in the final outcome. It's ok. We have a year or two to further research, ponder, discuss and plan the earth floor for our next stage of building. It will be better next time. 

It's a little bit hard to admit this failure. To be honest, we have felt a little demoralised about it. Annie did so much research and we had such a clear vision about how beautiful our floor of earth was going to be. And it just hasn't worked out as we hoped. But it's fine. It's hard and dry and strong and we've not had any other major disappointments (or none that we can still remember) so we're just filing it away as a wonderful learning opportunity and trying to move on…

Because we've set ourselves a deadline. We will move in in two weeks. No more couch surfing for this family of four. However it's going to be rough and unfinished and probably a little crazy for awhile. 

So for now, things are a little heart-in-mouth busy, we're both suffering a little insomnia as we contemplate all that is to be done but still, it's all pretty good. 

We have beautiful Winter time vistas to admire, 

Wintery sun beachy adventures 

lovely old timbers to ogle

spiky critters to meet and

fun building adventures with friends

Oh yeah and we got a Landcare grant of a thousand native trees and plants to help establish a wildlife corridor in our area. Hurrah!

So floor schmoor, whether it ends up Sea Otter or Ox Blood it doesn't really matter. It's a teeny tiny house with a teeny tiny floor that we really enjoyed making but yes,  we will do better next time. 

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.

Some Pepe Progress

This week we are lucky enough to have Pearl's dad, John (aka 'Pepe' or 'Peps') staying with us, toiling dutifully on our little house during the day, and washing our dishes and patting Cuddles the cat by the fire in the evening. It's been quite phenomenal to have him contributing to our home (again - he was at our workshop, too). I LOVE seeing the way different people work on things, what they're good at, how they face challenges and think through problems, and I LOVE that our home is being made by so many different hands!

Peps is quite the perfectionist. He likes taking his time, doing things properly and thinking things through thoroughly before he undertakes a particular task. I'm a little lacking in all of these fields, so I quite enjoy having a bit of the 'thorough' (as opposed to the 'gung ho') vibe on the worksite. It's also been amazingly calming for me, knowing that things are happening on our land during the day, when I'm at work. Most of the time I'm at work I'm more than a little bit antsy, unable to stop thinking about all the things that aren't getting done on the house while I'm spending my time writing grant applications and thinking up creative ways to get kids involved in re-using crap from the tip.
So what exactly has our Peps been up to?
He thoroughly cleaned out all the loose straw and clay and general crap that had accumulated inside our little house over the last 9 weeks (I can't believe it's only been 9 weeks!). It was important to do this so that there was no potential for decomposition under the earth floor, which could potentially lead to 'sinking' sections of the floor, which would contribute to cracking. This was a pretty immense job and, in true Pepe style, he went above and beyond the initial call of duty, excavating some of the accumulated inside clay seeking out little hidden pockets of buried straw. Yeah!

The Peps hard at work mattocking out potentially pesky straw

When this was done, he single-handedly wheelbarrowed in all of the gravel for the base layer for our rammed earth floor. No easy feat given that gravel, I have learned, is a pain in the arse to shovel. So we were more than a bit grateful for help in this regard. The gravel under the floor acts to stop any moisture that may seep in under the footings from creeping, via what's known as 'capillary action', up to the rammed earth. Because of the large air gaps left between the gravel pieces, moisture is unable to capillary up, which it could potentially do if it was just earth on earth, creating a damp floor - not really the look we're going for.

Morning sunshine on the under-floor drainage gravel

Then, he dug a lovely trench to drain any water that may collect in front of our water tank. This will have a bucket drain attached to it (yes, I will post a picture when it's done - very interesting if you're a drainage dork).

Neat drain - Pepe style

Our plan is to drain this water into a little pond in the veggie garden, which will provide habitat for frogs and lizards and birds and give us a spot to grow things like lemongrass, which dig being next to water.
Then he pointed out the totally spectacular sunset (we hadn't seen it because we were all huddled in front of the fire and/or busy cooking dinner and/or attending to children).

Quite outrageous day-before-solstice sunset

Then he did a spot of rendering, and today he lovingly de-nailed all the second-hand warehouse floorboards we scored for our loft. If it was up to me, I'd probably just skip this step. De-nailing? I know it's probably a good idea, but I just don't have the time or the patience to do a job like that.
So thank goodness for the Peps and his attention-to-detail ways!

On DAs and such

Today I got an email from a lovely lady called Holly who plays in The String Contingent. She and her partner are getting ready to submit the DA for their little strawbale cottage, which is to be built in Braidwood. I was so happy to hear from her because a) I like knowing that people are reading the blog and learning from it, b) I quite like answering questions, especially about building, and especially when it's going to help someone else build a totally awesome little-house-of-their-dreams and c) in her bio pic on her web-page, Holly is wearing an outrageously cute Icelandic wool jumper that she knitted herself (!) and which, in addition to being cute is "super warm and somewhat water repellent as Icelandic sheep have developed a special hairy layer in their coat to cope with the harsh winters". Yay, yay and double-yay.


In the interests of making our blog a place of learning for would-be strawbale builders, I thought it might be nice to answer Holly's questions in blog form, so others may benefit. Sorry to those of you who read this blog who are not building and/or interested in the minutiae of the building process.

Did you have any issues getting the earth floor through council? 
No we did not! we were lucky, I think, because the Bega Valley has had a long history of hippies moving in and building 'alternative' houses with things like mud bricks and composting toilets and earth floors. Basically, they'd seen it all before, so weren't that fussed. I also spent a lot of time on the phone to the planners at council before we submitted our DA, just getting a feel for what they were like, what they wanted, what they might be a bit 'funny' about etc. They were super nice! And also very helpful, happy to chat through things and tell us what they wanted/needed to get our house built. 


Did you use a private certifier for getting a construction certificate or did you use the council person? 
We got our DA and CC at the same time, both through council. We didn't really know what to do, and were tossing up both. I had talked to a friend who was a builder, and he said there were pluses and minuses to both of them. In the end we went with council just because it seemed a bit easier, and they all seemed nice enough and not freaked out by what we were wanting to do. As our inspector told us: "It's my job to help you be able to build the house you want, and to make sure it doesn't fall down on you".


Assuming you had to do a BASIX certificate... which flooring option did you put in? (earth isn't an option surprise surprise!) 
Our lovely building designer, Tracy did a crazy amount of work on our DA, basically putting the whole thing together for us. Amazing. She also did our BASIX for us, and I believe that she nominated a slab floor, on the assumption that a concrete slab will perform, thermally, in a similar way to earth. I don't know if this is particularly true, but I also don't really believe that BASIX is a terribly sensible way of assessing a building's sustainability, so don't put too much weight in it.


Any particular advice or things you wish you'd known before? 
Advice...hmmm... Well, at every stage of our building so far I've thought "I'm so glad this is so small!", so that's my biggie - make the house as small as you possibly can. If you're feeling a little bit funny about living in a small house or wondering if you can do it, read Little House on a Small Planet. It was revolutionary for me.


I would also probably look into an alternative for our footings, as ours were very concrete-happy. Holly, I know you're planning on a rubble trench - go you! I'll be really keen to know how that goes, how council is with it, and how it actually works.


I suppose I'd be hesitant to do load-bearing again, just because of the extreme stress we experienced when it totally pissed down on our uncovered bale walls during our building week. Not to say I'd totally write it off - I think there are distinct benefits, but I'd be scared, I reckon...


When you're budgeting, try to get a budget from someone else, and then fill in your own amounts. I had done a rough budget very early on, just trying to calculate costs for all the things I could think of. That was OK, but then my buddy Rebecca gave me a copy of the budget her husband had done for their place. It was so detailed! There was heaps of stuff in it that I hadn't thought of, so I used it as a template and just filled in our quantities and specifications, adding in special things like strawbales, which they didn't have. I also overestimated pretty much everything, meaning that our budget has served us pretty well.


I hope this all helps you get your DA together! I remember at the time feeling so stressed about it, like it was the biggest deal in the world. Once the build started though, boy did it shrink into insignificance. Kind of like our HSC: at the time you think it's the biggest deal in the world and if you don't do well you might as well just go and crawl into a little hole and never come out. Then you get into the real world, a few years pass, and you forget all the stuff you learned for the exams, you forget the mark you got, and, when something stressful happens in your life you think "man, if only I was just doing my HSC...".


Enjoy the DA process but believe me - things are going to get a lot more exciting once you actually start digging!

A driveway and a duck dam

Today a collection of "big noisy cars" came and dug around on our land. The main objective was the delivery and streamrolling of a slightly embarrassing amount of gravel, obtained from 'the pit' at Bermagui. After the week of rain that coincided with our strawbale building workshop, we realised that our dreams of a dirt driveway were... well... unrealistic. We have always been keen to try to limit the embodied energy of our little house-building exercise, and have done a reasonably good job of achieving that. And hey - very locally-sourced gravel isn't really huge on energy consumption, but it did come out of the ground and it is pretty much a non-renewable resource. So the decision to smother our super-slippery clay driveway in gravel was not taken lightly. But we did make the decision, and we did get the gravel, and we're going to live with our decision, knowing that it was basically the only way we could get our driveway to function as a driveway.
Item number 2 on today's agenda was the digging out of a pad for our water tank, which is being delivered on monday. We're pretty excited. The reason the pad had to be dug, rather than just levelled, is that the inlet on our water tank is 2.3m high, and the end of our gutter is only 2.4m high and the tank needs a 10cm 'pad' to sit on. Do the maths (I know - it's hard...), and you'll realise that something needed adjusting. Cue Moonie and his little bobcat and the job's done in about 5 minutes.



While all this driveway and tank-pad action was going on we were also enjoying watching some excavation on the other side of the house. This excavation was, for me, far more exciting than the driveway bizzo. This excavation resulted in the cutest little dam in the world, which is going to be our duck dam,

The diversion drain captures water off the road, carries it along the contour and into our new duck dam
(yellow shipping container in the background now contains all our worldly possessions!)

and a huge pile of clay which is going to be our earth floor (and probably our cob oven and a few other things as well). I LOVED watching our floor coming out of the ground not ten metres away from where it's going to be laid in our home.

Nothing more lovely than a big pile of floor on a sunny Autumn day!

And all our little visitors quite liked the action as well. We're having quite the love-in at the moment, after moving out of our rental house last week, and into the home of our quite lovely and special new friends Vickie, Max, Evan and Taylor, who have graciously offered us a space in their lives and their home for a few weeks between our last ever rental house (yay!) and our first ever hand-made by ourselves and our friends house (double yay!). Today they all joined us on the land to have a peek at the big machinery, bringing muffins and fruit and happy faces and testing out our clay by making sweet little flower-cups.

All in all it was a pretty satisfactory half-day, which made us very appreciative of the fact that we don't really have to do a lot of digging by hand. I can't even imagine digging even a little duck dam in the clay with just a shovel, so I quite enjoyed watching Moonie and his mate scooting around in their bobcats and little steamrollers and bigger excavator/front-end-loader-type things, moving our earth around to make way for water-harvesting and duck-growing.

This weekend we...

Received a ute-load of pallets and timbers and fence-palings and windows and doors.

These had been left at our old house in Sydney, and were lovingly delivered by Pearl's parents, who came down for a visit. These will need to be stripped, and frames will need to be constructed, all in the next 2 weeks before our workshop. Oh lordy...

Continued with the apparently never-ending job of preserving side-of-the-road apples.

Even after apple chutney and apple pies and stewed apples and sending several kilos to the lovelies at Cornersmith, we still have a mountain of apples on our kitchen bench. Yesterday while Pearl was at work I set to making some apple jelly using a recipe given to us by our lovely new friends Sara and Cam, who I was lucky enough to meet after getting involved with Bega Valley Swapsies. Sara and Cam have been tending their little acres at Upper Brogo, hand-building their own home, making food forests and ridiculously glorious swimming-dams for the last 10 years. Theirs is, quite frankly, the most inspiring property we've seen in the area, and a delicious glimpse of what could be possible for our little block if we work hard and concentrate the way these guys do. And in an area of inspiring and beautiful properties, that surely is saying something! These guys have also been hard at work preserving apples in the last weeks, and were happy to share with us their amazing jelly recipe.

It was, shall we say, a very involved process, which first involved boiling the crap out of the apples to remove their juice, straining and pressing through muslin, measuring and mixing with sugar and lemon juice, boiling again, skimming off the frothy scum on the top (which was, by all accounts, delicious, but this jelly is going in the Bega Show next year, so needs to be pure), pouring into sterilised jars then processing in a boiling water bath. Yep: The oven was on for a really long time today, and the whole shebang led me to conclude that apple jelly is not the most energy-efficient method of preserving yer apples, and definitely a bit of a treat. Not to mention freaking delicious.

Next stop, apple cider.

Cleared some of the rubble, loose stones/clay/leftover concrete and lumpy dirt out from inside the footings.

This is in preparation for the workshop, in 2 weeks time (oh lordy...), to create a reasonably level work area within the cottage, and to make sure no-one trips over anything while trotting around carrying a 30kg strawbale. It is also in preparation for our earth floor, which we will be laying after the workshop. We figure it's about a billion times easier to shovel all that crap out while there are no walls, rather than trying to do it with only the door and a couple of windows for openings.

Seeded the batter above our house-site with lucerne seed in anticipation of the rain that came rumbling over the hills this afternoon.

There is a lot more of the site that needs seeding, but most of that area is going to be used for storing strawbales before and during our workshop, so we're seeding it after the studio is built in 2 weeks time. Oh lordy... There are several reasons we're taking this seeding business quite seriously. One is to try to make sure the newly-exposed earth is stabilised against erosion, so that it doesn't all end up washed down to the bottom of the gully the first time we get a big downpour. We also want to try to get some useful plants growing, in lieu of the weeds that had previously populated the hillside. We're basically sowing leguminous nitrogen-fixers and green manures to try to prep the soil for the food plants we will eventually be planting (once the strawbales have all been moved and made into walls (!) we'll be sowing the entire space with billions of broad beans, more lucerne, cow peas, mustard, parsnips and peas). We also want to rebuild as much topsoil as we can. The thing about excavating a level spot on the side of a kind-of-steep hill is that, even if the excavator removes and stockpiles most of the topsoil before he starts really moving stuff around, you're still going to end up with way less than what you need to re-cover the area you've exposed. This isn't great when you have expansive veggie gardens/food forests/orchards in mind, so soil-building via the use of green manures and other beneficial crops, is top of the list of "what to do first thing after you have major earthworks done" (doesn't everyone have one of those lists??).

And yes, even with all this going on, we still feel that it's worthwhile to co-ordinate Oscar's socks with the rest of his working outfit.