The fifth day kicked off with the exterior render spraying continuing all the way around the straw walls. Being a Monday, the builders were back on-site to keep the overall build process rolling:
By the end of the day, the sun set over our beautiful exterior walls, lime rendered, scratched, and ready to dry out for a few weeks before their next coat:
The whole weekend I spent much of my time doing the conduit for electrical and data connections in the walls. I couldn't start this until the bales were in, but it did have to be done before the render went on, making for a fairly tight timeframe for me to learn what to do, make the obligatory beginner's mistakes, and then get it right before Frank and the team turned up to blast it all with the render gun, never to be accessible again.
We want to mount a TV on the end of the living room wall, so to handle this we needed to put a big plywood board on to the wall to take the weight. It used eight double-bale needles to push wires through the bales, and then was tied off on the other side. I then affixed lots of conduit for future power and data connections, and boxes to expose the outlets. The final result before rendering bore more than a passing resemblance to a sea creature:
The internal rendering then started in earnest. This mix was different from the exterior lime render - instead it was a clay render. We really liked the fact that clay from about fifteen meters down our hill had been tested and passed as suitable to use in the render mix. So that was literally shoveled in to the render machine along with some water and sand, then sprayed on the walls:
Once everyone left early to watch some horses run around in a circle at the local pub, Phoebe wanted to help out with the scratching:
At the end of the workshop we had all the walls up, all the exterior first coat of render done, and about half of the interior. A fantastic result which we thank everyone involved for. We learned plenty, and really hope all others did too.