Skin

I like cladding - it's kinda the skin of a building, the bit you see most often & also the part which will see the most weather action. We ummed & aahed a lot about cladding, talked about various options - aesthetics, durability, cost, ease of installation - but in the end went for macrocarpa mostly because it smells so good :-) (Much irony in this decision, considering that we - especially I - smell so bad at the moment due to long dusty sweaty days doing building stuff).

We also like re-using things we already have, or at least getting things locally. So being able to whizz over to Bromley & pick up our cladding from a small garden furniture making factory there was real nice.

Choices choices choices - we then had to decide what, if anything, to put on the macro cladding. We learnt a good lesson here - whatever anyone tells you about stain, it is not a natural colour. We bought the most "natural" stain we could find, hoping to see the grain of the timber, but in the end got a light chocolate brown as a finish. Despite the initial surprise, we like it more & more - the hut has been transformed from a giant liquorice allsort to more of a caramel toffee.

So now we begin to head indoors where we can really get into some recycling - floorboards from the old house (which will go on both floor & ceiling), & also our old roof sarking which will go on the walls. Sanding sanding sanding...

Nice straight lines on the south side

SilliNess

Rampant silliness

Trickiness around the big windows

Installing the mezzanine rafters - love recycling those rimu beams

The final touches on puttying the East bay window - thanks again to James, Dave, Derek & Lucia for helping lift the glass into place

Praise be the angle grinder - makes short work of tidying up the floorboards

Painting the underside of the floorboards, which will form the mezzanine floor

Fernie delivers more essential yumyums for the workers, Nessi looking VERY excitied

Artists rendition of the hut - by Jule (6) & Anne-Marie (5) 

Our very own pot of gold

It's window time

To give a small area a sense of spaciousness you tend to need a few windows - either that or no roof (ie a fence) or do without a few walls (ie a picnic shelter). We have a good selection of windows - 3 new (well 2nd hand new, from Brown Sparrow recycling - love that name) & 3 recycled from our old house. The big ticket items are our recycled bay windows, each of which weighs a tonne - it took four of us to lift the small one, & six blokes couldn't lift the big one!

It's also been a neighbourhood effort to find storage for the bay windows - the small one ended up in Anna's barn (along with the frame of the big one, plus a stack of rimu joinery), & the glass for the big one went into Femke's garage (snuggled up between our mattress, washing machine & old desk). So great to get all this wonderful salvaged material out again & meld it into a new space.

Here's a few pics to be going on with - more to come soon :-)

South side window + cavity battens

East side, with repainted bay window

Nessi striding keenly along the NW frontier, cavity batten in hand

Cavity batten getting the chop