The next big adventure

Almost 3 years ago, we broke ground to make way for the tiny handmade strawbale house we currently call home. It was a momentous occasion for us, full of mixed feelings, and it was the beginning of a journey that basically consumed us for the following couple of years.

Building the tiny house was always a bit of a 'suck it and see' kind of exercise - to find out if we could really build our own house. Turns out we could! It was really hard at times, but it was always rewarding. And we so thoroughly enjoyed the experience of building, and have so thoroughly enjoyed living on our land, in our little handmade home, we're doing it again.

4 year old barefooted pirates are invaluable on the building site

In the last few months we've begun to slowly make moves towards building a second, slightly less tiny, slightly more luxuriously appointed (internal plumbing!!) handmade strawbale house. We don't have heaps of money, and we certainly don't want to go into debt, so things will be slow-going, as we plan to save a bit, build a bit, over the next few years.

Shadow of a shovelling lady

Building the tiny house has given us an excellent perspective on what we really want and need from a home, and what we can and can't manage to build by ourselves. We've discovered a few things we're going to do differently second time around (45 degree pitch roof? No thank you!), and a few things we're definitely going to do the same (strawbale? Most certainly!). If you're thinking of building your own home, it's something to seriously consider: I believe that building this place was the single best thing we've done in the last 5 years. The knowledge, skills and perspective it's given us - not to mention the savings in rent and bills! - have been absolutely invaluable, and we're very grateful to have had the opportunity.

So what are we planning to build next?

It's pretty basic: a strawbale rectangle with a skillion roof, containing 3 very small bedrooms, a fully strawbale-enclosed cool pantry (bigger than the bedrooms - food storage takes priority over sleeping space in this family!), a nice, open, functional kitchen, a beautiful warm eating area, and a lounge space with a wood fire that doubles as an oven and stove. 

Oscar and my dad laying the pipe that will carry our greywater directly to an absorption trench in our zone 1 garden

External walls will be rendered strawbale, internal walls will be framed using recycled wood pallets, clad with reclaimed corrugated iron and fence palings. Our experiences over the last few years of bathing outside have prompted us to forego an internal bathroom in preference of more kitchen space, with a primitive, outside greenhouse/shower-room combo to complement our existing firebath, which we love so much! We're also going to have another outside, composting toilet.

Footings full of water, which our dogs think of as purpose-built doggy-lap-pools, much to the detriment of the footings themselves

But for now, all we have is a kind of muddy area with some footings full of water, and pier-holes full of frogs, and occasionally children. 

Oh and a 110 000L tank that is collecting water off its own roof until we get it hooked up to the house. Not terribly appealing or inspiring, but it's a start, and our minds and hearts are busy and full, as we dream of this next big building adventure.

The first days of spring, oh how we're loving you

How exciting that it's spring! Given that we've just experienced what we hope will be The Crappest Winter Ever, the springtime this year is more welcome than ever - bring on the new growth, both literal and metaphorical, I say! My hair's growing back (it feels like a little baby lamb!), we're slowly recovering our energies after the exhaustion-inducing chemo regime, and everything is looking extra sunshiny and new given the deepened gratitude we're experiencing as a result of the last 6 months or so. We've been absolutely revelling in the warm sunny days, picking early raspberries, resting, enjoying spring rains, watching our chickens loving the new shoots of grass, smiling at rosellas in the kennedia, and working working working on the garden - weeding, mulching, harvesting and spring planting yay!

We've also been...

Crocheting veggie tea cozies for lovely gardening sisters,

 Debuting new birthday frocks and devouring the goodness (mushrooms! Honey! Profiteroles! Jersey milkshakes! Crazy amounts of beautiful, bountiful veg! Fresh and smoked fish!) at the Moruya Farmers' Markets,

 Being thrilled by big digging and dreaming about another little strawbale house growing from the mud over the next couple of years,

Crocheting around jar-lid-rings to make bangles for the Mumbulla School Spring Fair,

 Eating duck egg omelettes with greens from the garden and bartered kimchi in the sunshine almost every morning, and loving our life.

How about you? How are you heralding the warmer days?

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.

An anniversary

When we open iphoto, it defaults to the 'last 12 months' folder. I kinda like it, because every time I open the program, I get a little look at what we were up to exactly 12 months ago.

March 2012 - Moonie chops up our land to make way for home-building and driveway-making

March 2013 - home and driveway complete. Well.. almost...

Last time I opened it, I saw the pictures of our excavations and home-building. These photos - especially the ones from our workshop, especially the muddy ones - make me feel kinda funny inside. There's a big bit of pride at what we've achieved in only 12 months since breaking ground here, but there's also a bit of residual anxiety (it was stressful!!), lots of love (all those people helping us!!), relief (thank goodness we're not building load-bearing again!!) and joy that we're now living our dream, and that our relationship and family love has grown so much as a result of this adventure we're on.

April 2012 - mixing render by hand with my little 'helper'. I could barely keep my footing in that crazy mud...

March 2013 - Ahhh... gravel.

As I'm a results-driven kinda lady, I get immense pleasure from looking at what we've made here, and looking back on these photos is a big part of that feeling. When you're in it every day, it's hard to realise the progress you're making. These photos remind me that yeah - it's only been a year. We've achieved a lot. They help me to slow down a little and take it in (I can be impatient), and enjoy what we've built rather than rushing on to the next project. Anniversaries and birthdays are good like that - they're the most perfect opportunity to reflect on what you've got, where you've been, how you've grown, and where you'd like to go next.

April 2012 - final days of the strawbale building workshop, and the roof's finally going on, providing much-needed protection for our little house

March 2013 - and now she's got solar panels and a pergola and a garden!!!

When the earthworks started, 12 months ago, I felt so nervous to be disrupting the earth and all the things living on and in it. I felt nervous to be really, physically embarking on this building thing with, I realise now, very little knowledge. Sure, we had guts and determination to spare, but real, hands-on building knowledge was quite thin on the ground, though I felt, at that time, like we could do anything we wanted. And I suppose these photos show that you can, with love and determination and help from friends and family, and a willingness to ask questions of everyone, everywhere you go, and books, and helpful people who are happy to share knowledge, skills and experience. You can do it.

June 2012 - building detritus a-go-go and still plenty of mud

March 2013 - nasturtuims: the speedy gardening solution 

The objectives of building this little house were always to 'see if we can' (just like David Byrne wrote Psycho Killer just to "see if he could write a song"... I think that worked out OK for him), to provide somewhere to live while we saved up to build something else, so we wouldn't be enslaved by a mortgage for our whole lives, and to learn from our mistakes. 

And it has been an amazing learning experience. We've learned so much about building, about our land, about ourselves, about each other, about the resilience of kids, about the fun-ness of lofts and fire-baths, about the differences between wants and needs, about the seasons, about living on the land and working with it and learning from it, about happiness and tiredness, about plants and animals... the list goes on.

We feel really really lucky.

June 2012 - what the hell do we do with this???

March 2013 - steps, veggies, flowers, native shrubs, a barbecue, trampoline and cubby house - of course!

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.

Tip number 9

Today I apprenticed to our friendly concreter, Bill, and learned, from an experienced local and excellent teacher (he also teaches martial arts, knot-tying, and horsemanship!) the finer details of pegging out, levelling, marking lines, successfully supervising the excavator who didn't do the job properly the first time, and tying the steel reinforcements with nifty gadgets with names like "ligs" and "trench chairs". It was pretty great, in an overwhelming, slightly terrifying, "Thank god Bill's here to help me with this massive task", "Now I understand why everyone says that owner building isn't actually super-fun" kind of way. The photo below shows some of our outcomes today - profile hurdle, trench-mesh all ready to be "dropped" (lingo for putting it in the hole) a lovely batter wall and a drain to steer any errant water away from our precious building site. To the uninitiated, it probably doesn't look like much, but I can assure you - it was quite a day.

The learning curve I took a ride on today was akin to one of those big ski-jumps they use in the winter Olympics, and probably about as scary. I'm not going to attempt to impart all the things I learned today but, in the interests of keeping this blog as a helpful place for other would-be self-builders of strawbale and other earthy-type homes, I thought I'd put a few of the biggies out there so that others may learn from our mistakes.

1. If, like me, you have to work and so cannot supervise your excavator, get someone who knows what they're doing - and what you want - to be on site to ensure your digging-guy does a good job. We spent some time this morning having the cut re-done and tidied up, because I wasn't there on the day to make sure it was done right the first time.

2. If you're having any kinds of earthworks done, be flexible with your design: you don't know what you're going to find under that topsoil. Our friend the big rock (who I'm actually growing kind of fond of, despite the changes it has forced has meant that a) the studio is no longer going to be able to fit on the cut only, thereby requiring the front corner to be on fill, which requires piers, which require a crapload of concrete, and b) we cannot angle it enough (without raising the north eastern corner to a ridiculous height) to get it truly on the east-west axis, which means that our 'perfect' passive solar house isn't going to be so perfect after all. After we pegged it out in a few different configurations and positions, it became apparent that facing it true solar north, as we had originally intended, just wasn't going to happen.

We ended up pegging it as best we could facing north-east (the photo above is taken facing east-south-east, straight down the valley towards the town of Bega, with profile hurdles and pre-tied steel in the middle-ground), minimising the amount of fill underneath us, but the pier holes, as Olive can attest, are still pretty deep (much deeper than we would have liked).

3. You can make your profile hurdles out of star pickets and timber, and they'll actually be better than if you make them out of just wood! I've been reading tons of building books over the last year or so, and they all told me to make my profile hurdles out of 2x4 timber, so I thought this was the only way to go. But when we came to peg out, Bill whipped out a couple of very short star pickets instead.

According to Bill, these are superior because they go into the ground easier, creating less disturbance in your soil profile, and can be reused indefinitely. I'm a fan.

4. Normal garden lime is fine for marking lines. No need for fancy spray paint markers.

5. Our soil, under the (quite lovely and black) topsoil, is pretty much just clay. This, like most things, has plusses and minuses. On the minus side, clay, due to its water-holding capacity, tends to expand and contract a bit in response to shifts in temperature. As Bill helpfully pointed out "It's pretty much the worst thing you can build on". Gee, thanks for those words of encouragement. On the plus side though, Bill also commented that our clay is about the best he's ever seen, and "people pay a lot of money for clay like that - you should be building pise". We are not building pise, on account of our strict adherence to Frank Thomas' motto that "if it isn't strawbale it's not worth building", but the clay-i-ness of our subsoil does bode well for our earth floor, which is probably going to be built with the clay we get out of the "big hole" Moonie has planned. I'm choosing to think of it as our top dam.

6. Reinforcing steel that has just been cut with an angle grinder cuts like a knife. Wear gloves.

7. Frilly polka-dot swimmers and gumboots are excellent attire for helping your mumma get all the stray rocks out of the pier holes and footings.

8. Doing physical work outside is good for the body, mind and soul, and I hadn't realised how much I miss it since getting this office job of mine! I spent the drive home devising ways I could incorporate more outdoorsy stuff into my job and/or getting a job with landcare.

Tomorrow we form up. More learning, I suppose. I am very very thankful to have Bill showing me the way, because even though I'm a pretty resourceful kinda lady who, as my father-in-law likes to say "would be in a shit sandwich" (I believe this is affectionate code for "will try anything once") I reckon that without some guidance I may have been out of my depth today. Turns out you can't learn everything from books. I reckon a day spent with an experienced, patient, skilled person would be better than all the reading in the world. And that's my tip number 9.

Dirt, dirt, some big rocks, some REALLY big rocks, some clay and more dirt

In the lead up to our big dig, we've both been feeling, in different ways, a pretty unprecedented level of anxiety, excitement, emotion (at scarring our beautiful hill and beginning, in a physical way, our building journey), impatience and wonder. We really had no idea what we were in for, both of us having never experienced this digging shindig before. People have been warning us, telling us about how big the machines are, how much the ground shakes, how you can never be prepared for how big the cut's going to be etc etc. So we'd built up our expectations to fit with all these warnings, trying to picture the worst... and getting it so, so wrong.

Moonie, our uber-relaxed (almost a little too relaxed) excavator has had us on tenterhooks the last few days, us wondering if he was actually going to show up when he said he would, and just hoping and hoping the rain stayed away. I finally got hold of him this morning, and he was all like "It's cool man, it's all cool. Just relax". Relax!!??? you want me to relax when we've got 15 people coming to raise our strawbale cottage in 3 weeks and we have absolutely nothing prepared?? Relaxing, under these circumstances was not on my agenda.

I left him to do his thing at around 9 this morning, then returned just after lunch, bracing myself for the terrible scar I was about to behold. Let's just say it was a bit of an anticlimax.

There was a nice entrance, a gently sloping and curving driveway down to the house site, which was not dreadfully huge or unnatural-looking (other than the complete absence of grass) and a very gently sloping batter up to the natural slope of the land. Not deep, not steep. And I could perfectly imagine our little house nestled cosily into the hillside on the pad provided. But why had he left that huge pile of dirt just to the left of the dozer?

Oh. That would be because it's not actually a pile of dirt but a giant, enormous boulder. A too-big-to-move-even-with-a-bulldozer boulder. Lucky it's not right in the middle of where the house is s'posed to be going, but it did nudge the house forward enough that it's no longer going to be just on the cut (ie. sturdy ground with no need for piers). Looks like around half a metre of the north-eastern corner of the studio is going to be on the fill, meaning that we're going to need those pesky piers after all. At least a couple of them, anyway. The reason we were attempting to get the whole thing on the cut was to avoid the extra concrete needed to fill a pier hole. We're not massive fans of concrete, or, to be more precise, cement, on account of it's totally obese embodied energy. Hence the earth floor and as-minimal-as-possible strip footings. But thanks to our friend the giant displacing boulder, we're gonna be using a bit more of it then we bargained for. But that's cool. We've watched enough Grand Designs to know that's how these things roll. Remember the one where they were making the underground vet clinic and found 2 huge voids??!!! At least we didn't find them eh? But we get the moral of the story: When you're digging deep underground you never quite know just what you're going to find. Even an experienced local operator like Moonie didn't expect the boulders

or the massive amount of clay underneath our topsoil. Being eternal optimists, Pearl and I just kept thinking how good this would be for our earth floor and dam-building later down the track, while Moonie was a bit disappointed he didn't find the decomposed granite he had expected, which would have been perfect for covering the driveway.

But now it's done. I had wanted some kind of little ceremony on the day we broke the ground - a dinner on the cut, some sprinkling of seeds for soil-stabilising groundcover, but we've had such an immense week of late working nights, 5am wake-ups and middle-of-the-night anxiety attacks, that we were actually too exhausted to do much more than take a few photos and exclaim, tiredly "Wow. It's really not as bad as I thought it would be".