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Wednesday, May 2. 2012House Progress January 2012
January 2012 was a time when I used my break from work to get cracking with cabling. This was one of the few things I felt capable of doing in the house in a reasonable timeframe, and it saved us quite a lot of money.
Meanwhile the real trades people were getting on with things like the second coat of exterior render: There was plenty of internal rendering to do - one coat was already done on the strawbale walls, but the main builder didn't have the other internal walls or the north wall ready so it was one coat behind. First step to rectifying that was insulation and plenty of it: Even with one coat left to go, the house was looking rather handsome: Once I had triple-checked that I'd put all the required cabling inside the roof and walls we'll never see again, I gave the builder the go-ahead to get started with sheeting up the areas weren't already embedded into either render or Hebel, and the roof: Friday, April 27. 2012House Progress December 2011
Here you can see the Hebel panels which were used for the North wall, as distinct from the strawbale used on the other three walls (seen at left edge).
The reasons our architect designed it this way were that in our climate less insulation can be used on north walls to allow more winter sun in, without major risk of huge amounts leaking back out again, as well as gaining more interior space. The final composition of this wall was (outside to in) lime render, hebel, hebel racks, foil insulation (seen in blue) then stud frame filled with bulk insulation. On the inside of the stud frame is villaboard (mounted rough side out) which is rendered with clay render. Windows and most of the doors went in next: Plenty of services needed to be run before the internal work could be completed: All the while the living room was slowly taking shape: The kids loved "helping" out too: The internal walls were next - these are mostly Hebel again between the frames, and then earth rendered. After Hebel blocks were cut to size (builders got sick of this rather quickly), including channels for conduit, we had to install the services outlets for future power points: Temporary laundry, kitchen and front doors were installed to achieve "lock up" while the picky clients dilly-dallied about what they wanted these to actually be: Other doors - such as the back door that Phoebe models here - already showed very promising signs: Tuesday, November 22. 2011Sheep Delivery
Poor Dougal wasn't coping with the amount of grass in the field we had made for him, so we decided to give him some competition in woolly form.
Our neighbour has sheep, and also had a mate who had too many, so a deal was struck and the ute arrived one Sunday morning: For the first couple of days the sheep stuck well together, and Dougal as far away from them as possible: Now however they are on much better terms. They share the somewhat sheltered spots under the tree in weather like we are having at the moment. Plus Dougal now has yet another friend too... Monday, September 19. 2011Framing, Fencing, Farming
After only a week we are able to stand upstairs in our new house! The downstairs frame has gone up rapidly - our builder basically called in his carpenter mates from around the state and has wasted no time in assembling the frame and modifying it to suit as required. We picked up a couple of small changes required, and it's utterly brilliant to be able to have these modifications made an hour or two later.
Roof trusses were delivered yesterday for the bedroom wing where they will be hidden, and we are almost at the point of deciding on what the exposed trusses will be over the cathedral-roofed living wing. The builder will assemble these himself as we the clients are being picky and want these to be features of the space. We have spent the last couple of weekends getting an internal fence up to contain the first furry creature to find its way to our land - we'll take delivery of a Shetland pony this weekend. He is from the house next door to our last one in Picton - his current owners offered him to us as they want to get some cows in their paddock instead. We formed quite a bond with him while living there as we fed him most days over the fence, and hope he settles in well. So we have a 2600m2 field set aside for him to munch on. Given the crazy rate of our grass growth he'll likely need some friends such as sheep to ensure he doesn't over-eat and meet the same fate as his mother unfortunately did. All in good time. Learning to fence has been great fun and it is very satisfying to see the progress. We've also finished getting our cables into the trenches and now just need to complete the back-filling so that he doesn't fall in. As Phoebe keeps saying "we have our own little farm now", which is truly heart-warming - it's just the lifestyle we hoped to be providing for our kids. William keeps trying to escape the shed and go for a wander outside by himself too. Once he is past the eat-everything phase we might even let him. The first couple of trees are in, and we're planning the layout of the rest of the land for more as time permits. Wednesday, August 10. 2011Onto the Land we go
After an amazing amount of stress, physical labour, coordination and time, we are now as of a week ago somewhat settled living on our property! We've built a bathroom and kitchen and backed a caravan in to the bigger of our two sheds, and this is now home.
Between Liz and I (with assistance from our ever-helpful parents), we have have run conduit for power, cabled all the data, built and installed kitchen cabinets and sink, waterproofed the bathroom, and coordinated the many sub-contractors who've made the place somewhat livable. That was difficult enough, but add in moving home (we have too much stuff!!) and two challenging little people and it's been in retrospect the busiest two-week period of our lives. We now have the satisfaction of no more rent to pay, and many more smaller tasks we can complete at a somewhat more sedate pace over the next few weeks, months and years. Phew. Monday, May 30. 2011Children Growing
So last night we signed a building contract. Phew - what an effort to get to this point but it is all starting to feel worth it and slowly fall in to place!
This blog has been sitting, nagging at my mind for attention but the continued uncertainty has meant that I've not had any confirmed news to report for a long time - a series of major changes in plan and dead ends. But now, it's time to slowly open the flood gates. Starting first, and most importantly with family. Phoebe is now at preschool two days a week, and becoming quite the miniature-sized grown up. The phrases and concepts she comes up with every day continue to amaze us - yesterday she was concerned that some other cars (4x4s) have their spare wheel visible on the outside, and asked why our red red car (the Peugeot 406 "snail" station wagon) does not. Liz's reply of "it's in the boot, hidden away" has prompted much concern about the welfare of the wheel, and whether it will be capable of helping us when required. She's very clever - being a space-saver spare I actually share her concerns. Her sleep most nights is easy, with her last night asking Liz around 6:30pm to be taken to bed. She still comes in once or twice a night to lie down with us, which we've now accepted as at least it's all calm and relaxed. Then this morning she wasn't up until after 7. This is still unusual - my noise-making getting off to work around 5:30 each morning tends to wake at least someone. Our little man William is such a delight to have around, he's always smiling, poking out his tongue, climbing up to us for a cuddle, and chasing his sister or the dog around the house. He has a funny little "ha. ha. ha." laugh which never fails to make his parents smile. There's no stopping his crawling, and he'll climb up anything and push off for a second or two's balancing before falling down only to try again. Steps can't be far away now. And the quantity that the little guy can eat! His munching sessions can stretch to 45 minutes. Teenage boy in house will require overdraft, that much is certain. He too sleeps pretty well, certainly much better than Phoebe did at his age. Down by 6:30 or so most nights, but then often after an hour or less decides he wants to be up to see what's happening in the world for an hour or so. He was quite sick last week which mucked all our sleep up but that's now the exception rather than the rule. Between two parents getting two babies off to sleep, we have the routine working pretty well really and Liz and I actually get to have evenings together again. This has been extremely helpful with the huge amount of progress we've been making on the house and land design, at least on the nights when we aren't too exhausted to do anything other than flop on the couch to unwind. The house will be the subject of almost all upcoming posts... [More photos here on flickr] Wednesday, April 6. 2011Family
I could probably wait forever for the time to process photos to add a well-structured blog post, but life is hectic and rapidly becoming moreso, so let's write something down instead of nothing!
Phoebe's now at preschool two days a week and loving it. This prompted us to drop her day sleep because they don't encourage that at preschool, so she's a very very tired girl once she comes home from her fun day. There's always a new painting, craft, and germ to bring home and share with everyone else in the household. Great fun for all the family :) Two other days a week are spent burning off energy at gymnastics and swimming, where she's making rapid progress through the grades and now almost doesn't need the assistance of a bubble. She's in her big girl's bed now, and very much learning about the world and how to interact with other people. When she is rested enough, she can play by herself for a long time. We've had some great family times together recently, and even Daddy-Phoebe days to give Liz a break. A stand-out event was her being featured in our local paper after Clean Up Australia Day, which she loved even if she doesn't look it in the photo! Preschool has of course given Liz a chance to spend more time with William, and he sleeps far better in the absence of the noise machine that is his big sister. He's growing up so fast - at eight months he's now climbing up alongside furniture and slowly shuffling himself along. He's such a calm, happy little man that it's heartbreaking to see him suffering through nasty colds and coughs like he is at the moment. Still, there's always a big smile not far behind, showing off his comical first front top tooth. Phoebe's adapted well to William being around, and there have been a few recent conversations along the lines of me saying "it's time to go home now Phoebe", and in a very sad, worried voice, her asking "is William coming too?". She loves having him in her life, as we all do. Both kids are always a pleasure for me to come home to, and I believe Liz even enjoys almost all of her time with them, despite the pressures of a toddler, sick infant, and the majority of the house work. I very much appreciate this, especially since I'm working much longer hours due to a recent promotion at work. She's aiming to go back to work in June, but just how we manage that hasn't yet been discussed. There's other big things in life to work out too, but that's another post. Monday, December 6. 2010Some Days Need a Blog Post
What. A. Day.
It started out looking fairly simple. Just ring the estate agent and tell them we accept the offer on our Penshurst property that we'd had the weekend to think about, once they got back to us after trying to squeeze a bit more money, then tell the mortgage broker to go ahead with the building loan application based on the discussion we just had with the builders to provide a new quote now that we knew the Penshurst property was going to be sold. Simple enough, right? Of course we needed to sign some paperwork and rather than drive to an agent in Sydney we opted to Express Post it back from the local post office once they had witnessed a signature. Easy enough, quick trip with noisy kiddies but all ok. Drive back home, noting that the recent amazing rains had caused localised puddles and rivers in the middle of fields to gush to life. The world is very real out here. For those who haven't visited, the rental property we are in is half way up a valley with only one access road. The stream that cut out the valley millions of years ago is typically barely a trickle, but at times it floods enough that the causeway had an adjacent bridge built many years ago. We call it the old bridge, bet you can't guess why. It's currently shut for what appears to be an almost complete rebuild. Can you see where this is going? It turns out that on our fifteen minute trip to the post office we were likely the last ones to cross the causeway before the waters completely overwhelmed it, such that upon our return we were faced with this: Chatting with the local farmer who has lived in the valley all his life, the advice was to leave and return a few hours later. So, what to do but to head to our favourite coffee shop R. Coffee for a sit and a think. Then the supermarket to stock up. Then to return to the flood zone only to realise we weren't driving across any time soon. By this time the council had showed up and ended up assisting us to walk across the unfinished, wet concrete / mud / huge gaps bridge with two kiddies, some supplies, and the intention to walk to our house about 1km further up the road. By then some locals with less regard for their well being decided to drive straight through with enough success to encourage me to walk back across the bridge and drive it anyway (family-free). So we made it, and returning late this evening for a look the waters have receeded. Any further rain and no doubt it will all be back again. Along with copies of the forms we posted, we also managed to access with some family help Liz's payslips at her work and a letter from the office about her maternity leave, all also required for mortgage application. These were variously scanned and emailed. And everything had to go to the solicitor too of course. It's fun to do seemingly never-ending things together as a family. A bit of action and adventure thrown in help somewhat too. So yes, we appear to have hopefully sold our house and be building starting in the new year with luck. Just a few more items to knock over first but they're looking hopeful now. For the record, universe, I'm quite happy to have less things at once from now on. Brain melted. Back to work tomorrow for a break.
Posted by Alison Gould
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09:54
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Wednesday, November 3. 2010House Design Progress
The lack of blog updates on the house hasn't meant that we have been idle - on the contrary. It's just that we've been doing a lot of things behind the scenes, forking over sums of money for this and that to approach a set of plans we can submit to council.
These have been developed partially with a builder who specialises in strawbale and earth homes, which we have been to see a few of and walked away extremely impressed. Current clients of theirs too have independently been very positive about the experience, as have other people involved in the small strawbale building industry in Australia. We now have some finished (if they ever are!) plans for a single story "boomerang"-shaped house, with an upstairs rumpus room across the middle to capture the distant horizon views from our block. The builders have given us an initial quote to build this, and we understand what the bank will lend us - next challenge is to get these two figures a little closer to each other! One step we've been holding off on for a long time now but have finally decided to do is to put our Penshurst Street house on the market. We have kept hold of it ever since we moved out of Sydney to Picton, renting it out to the one lot of tenants who have been great. However we now need to sell to afford what we need for our family home and with just a touch of regret it is about to be up for sale. We inspected it a few weeks ago and it's still being kept well by the tenants, the renovations we did before moving out still looking fresh. Having been in situations with extremely short notice to leave a rental premises ourselves, we are giving our tenants plenty of notice in case the new owners choose to move in rather than use it as an investment themselves. It's been by far the most crazy and stressful period of our lives working through to this point with two young children in tow, and we wouldn't have got this far without the help of Margaret, Helen and Neil. Plus my amazing wife Liz dealing with a newborn, most of the housework and a daughter who certainly got the memo about expected behaviour during the "terrible twos". There's plenty more to come we understand, but by mid to late next year all going well we should be relaxing with a glass of wine on our land in the house we designed and even built some of. Sounds awesome. You have to set yourself challenges in life - they almost always pay off.
Posted by Alison Gould
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Contented William
The littlest man in our lives William is growing at a rapid rate of knots, putting on a healthy amount of weight and just loving the world. He's so quiet and contented most of the time that I often find myself at this crazy time of life only just remembering that we have him. That in itself is not something I'm particularly proud of but is the subject of another post.
Most importantly for his parent's sanity, he understands how to sleep!!! Unless you too have lived through many years of extremely challenging nights with little or no sleep, backed up with a day of more at home or long days working away from home, you may not realise just what a godsend this is. He's asleep by 8 or 8:30 most nights and doesn't ususally wake until after 5. This might sound awful for those of you without kids, but we would have given anything for Phoebe to do the same, just one night ever. As it stands, he sleeps through the night more soundly at the age of 3 months than she does at nearly 3 years. However, she is far better than she was before which we are of course still extremely grateful for. He's got plenty of smiles to share, and just loves interacting with objects and people. After the challenges we face elsewhere in life he's a little island of simplicity - insert cuddles and/or silly faces, receive smiles. Everyone needs that in life. Doting parents' collection of baby pics is here. Wednesday, August 11. 2010William Claude Gould
Born 12:02 on Saturday 7th August 2010, we now have a little son William. He was born in Campbelltown hospital (after Camden's maternity ward was closed after we had signed up there) with the assistance of the amazing midwifery staff there and primarily our midwife Linda.
Liz once again amazed me with the way she gave birth - this time not even taking the two Panadol she had birthing Phoebe. It was all very natural, in the water, and in retrospect about as relaxed as you could expect such a process to be. Although I'm sure she wouldn't describe it using that word! Being very close to choosing a homebirth originally, we were intending to leave hospital as soon as possible as it's never the best place to be for what we feel is a very natural, non-medical process. However the hospital staff had some concerns about his well-being and he and Liz ended up staying two nights in various tight spaces amongst the amazingly busy maternity ward. We were extremely happy to be given the all-clear to return home on Monday morning, and have spent the time since coming to terms with two little people living in our house. Neither Liz nor I want to jinx the process, but thus far he's been very settled, feeding well (almost constantly!) and sleeping contentedly. Time will tell if this excellent state of affairs continues. Phoebe is doing really well, understanding that our "family cuddles" have grown from three to four people, being gentle, and at least trying to understand when we can't give her immediate attention all the time. I have two weeks off and with luck this will continue after I return to work. As you may expect, our little man has his own website at williamgould.net, currently containing a selection of pregnancy and birth photos. His middle name Claude honours my mother's father, and the first name we chose on its own merits, but also ties in nicely with grandfather Claude's surname - Williams. Many people asked if we knew what gender we were having - we didn't this time - and then whether we wanted a boy to "balance things". Neither of us believed this was in any way necessary, but now that we have our little man, we wouldn't change him for anything. Welcome to the world, William. We're so happy to have to have you in our family! Monday, June 21. 2010Back to Picton we go
We've just spent our first night in a new house. No, not our new house we intend to build, just a different rental property.
The one we moved into in December when our previous house in Picton was sold was a significant compromise. Given only two weeks to find a place and move out, we didn't have a lot of choice. But we were told at the time that the owners (one of who lives on site) were planning on selling it at the end of this year. So, this move was to preempt that while the newest little bubba is still inside, but also to get around the issues we had with the place. The landlords were almost completely unresponsive, only wanting to do the bare minimum, and reneging on promises they made to fix the place up. Paying for 5 acres but only feeling we had the use of the house and immediate surrounds due to the landlady living (illegally) on site was another. Lack of garages or any external storage when we have two cars, a trailer, a ride-on mower and a caravan to store was starting to be a big hassle too. So, we took the hit of pain and moved. We're back in Picton (well, north-west of it really) on 5 acres again, but this time with the landlords safely away in Sydney somewhere. The move was about as painful as you can imagine. Actually no, it would have been worse without the help of our parents - thanks to Margaret, Mum, and Dad (Happy Birthday!) The owners had locked more locks than they gave us keys for, and then when we finally did get in the the place looked like a bombsite. It took three cleaners all day yesterday to make it acceptable. Not a good start. But the setting is gorgeous - tucked in a valley. It's so picturesque that today AAMI are shooting a commercial there. Not sure if it's one of those dodgy driver ones, but if so then the approach road is certainly a good setting. Hopefully this will have been an overall good move, and the last we make before we move onto our land.
Posted by Alison Gould
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20:44
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Sunday, April 4. 2010Side and Rear Fencing Up
Our neighbour asked us to get our boundary fence up as he wanted to start storing vehicles for his business on his land, so that was incentive enough to get that organised. We decided against doing the front fence at this stage due to the money that could be better used elsewhere, but even the process of getting two more sides fenced has been most exciting!
The pre-subdivision use of the land had a strange garden that we can't quite work out which stretched across our boundary, so the first task was to clear a path through that for the fence to run: Then to get to the old wire on the rear fence, I had to hack huge amounts of overgrown grass and blackberries from the farm to our rear: Once this clearing was done, a week or so later the most excellent fencers turned up and made quick work of getting holes sunk: And posts in: Liz even stopped by near a fresh post to show off her baby bump! : A couple of days later, and we had 300-odd metres of fencing done - the side brand new and the rear rewired: We happen to think the result is rather attractive: Tuesday, March 23. 2010Baby Two - pink or blue?
Well we decided yesterday not to find the answer to that question whilst having our 20 week scan. It's not all that relevant in light of the news that all is 100% healthy.
At one point the sonographer had trouble getting a view of one of the baby's hands as it was behind the head. The comment was made that this is usually a parental trait. Moments later I discovered myself leaning on their comfortable couch watching the big-screen view of our next child, arm behind my head comfortable on the wall. I've got some video to come once I edit it down, and also a "4D" (hate that name) picture that they did all as part of the excellent service. We have a printout of this to stare at, however for me at least it's still not very real that come August our family expands by one! Phoebe knows that there's a baby in mummy's tummy, but hasn't really grasped what that might mean to her life we think. Now of course I have to choose from twice as many baby names and come up with two short-lists! Saturday, March 13. 2010Land UpdateWe're spending a reasonably amount of time just mowing our block of land, and the associated bills with no real benefit are driving us to focus on saving to move on there! The first structure went up some time ago - I built a compost bin! Compost is rather difficult to move between properties, so our previous two have been left with a nice supply thanks to all our kitchen waste. There wasn't much point doing that again, so a bit of research and time later, and our land was no longer 5 empty acres. We've cleared some of the fallen trees and turned it into firewood, discovering our local wildlife in the process. Not long after we purchased the block, there was of course the question of how to tend so much grass. The answer was served up courtesy of an eBay-ed large commercial ride-on mower (diesel to run on 100% biodiesel, of course!) which we collected from the Hunter Valley thanks to the impressive grunt of the VW and a trailer we decided to buy to do the move ourselves. Both of these have proved great investments, even with a bit of repair work we needed to do to the mower. Starting this coming week our fencing starts to go up. The neighbor we are sharing the fence with unfortunately started the relationship off on a less-than-optimal note by reneging on a deal we had, however this is hopefully behind us now. The neighbor on the other side is a far different story - it turns out I used to work with him back at Strathfield Car Radios 13 years ago! One of those real small-world stories, and enough to completely overpower the let-down of the other neighbour. He fenced his block with the help of his father who lives around the corner, running an olive farm. This means he can borrow farming equipment as needed, although yesterday he had broken his slasher. The fact that he was slashing at given he has sheep on there shows just how much the recent rain has made the grass grow. Our block has sure taken some mowing in recent times! For the fencing we have to clear out a section of odd fenced garden that is mostly in our property but goes into the block next door which we want to separate ourselves from with the fence, this is tomorrow's task. The back fence is somewhat intact so we've asked the fencer to keep what he can to help keep our costs down, and I spent some time clearing away the blackberries and other overgrowth from the farm behind us with another new piece of gardening equipment we're going to need - a petrol whipper-snipper (using our electric one when the nearest power point we own is 3-4km away was proving a little difficult). We have decided for reasons of cost not to fence the front for now, instead waiting for a final decision on where our driveway is to go (there's a drainage ditch which if we are careful we can drive across but this won't work in the long-term for delivery trucks, etc.) Once that is done, we're pretty much done with the first phase of our project - get land and boundaries established. After that, the next phase begins - Services - where we get power, sewerage, water, hot water and phone available on the block in preparation for the following phase. This will be when we put up the barn with kitchenette, bathroom, heating, etc., then back in the caravan we purchased as cheap bedrooms and kitchen that we can sell later (currently sitting outside our rental property), and move onto our land! Current hopeful plan has us there in spring, after the new baby comes along. We could be there far earlier but have to pace our spending according to our earnings. I have a flickr set called Build on Razorback where I'm putting pictures of the process, and am also working on a more specific website to showcase our crazy plans as they evolve.
Posted by Alison Gould
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04:49
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