Kitchen progress

The kitchen is coming along nicely - this being our second small building creation, some things have gone very quickly with not much fuss at all. We've learnt. On the flipside it's hilarious some of the daft mistakes we keep repeating...over & over again. A rich & humbling project!

Huge thanks to all the locals who have pitched in when needed - our architectural import Sheryl has been amazing.

We've got the larch weatherboards stacked & ready to go now - looking forward to that next phase.

So ahh what do we do with this wall now?

Derek & Dave negotiate the 3 York St obstacle course in fine style

Sussing out the roof trusses

The simple joy of pounding in a nail, midwinter, in a t-shirt

By contrast the girls are totally rugged up on this day

Nighttime winter building - characterful stuff

A patchwork of ply scraps fills out this header nicely - I love this stuff :-)

Sheryl & Nessi hammering home the last few nails on the top plates

Roof trusses mid-way through installation

Sheryl in action again on the roof

Our unofficial building inspector is officially "off-duty" for the winter

Barge boards are on

Accumulated ice from a smallish puddle

Crikey it's been cold!

The engine room

After almost a year of improvised kitchening, it's time for the most important room in the home to take shape - the engine room - the kitchen. For us this presents a second small shed building opportunity. So, why wouldn't we? :-) 

This time round we're putting up a 2.4m by 3.6m shed on skids, which just fits within the parameters of what you can do with multiple small sheds on a section. 

Big muscles Lukes having a smashing good time with bricks

Several days later & a little worse for wear

In order to build the new kitchen we had to re-locate the kitchen tent...amazing how much stuff you can pack into a tent!

Lizzie departs for home, not before crafting the superb Bivvy sign

Time for a wee celebration - Hebe ensures the fire is well tended

Mmmm...can't beat a winter solstice bonfire

Flow

There's lots of trendy "indoor - outdoor flow" housespeak these days. It does kinda make sense. Having a transition from your inside space to your outside space, & vice versa, feels quite nice. The external & internal become one :-). On a more practical level, we simply need somewhere to put our shoes when it rains - there is nothing more disappointing than stepping out of your lovely front door, toes all snug in their woolly socks, straight into a soaking wet croc. Hence our deck & verandah.

Like most of the hut it's a combo project - some new timber, some old - with our key donors being Rach, Marty & Eva's old house in Albert Tce (we swooped in & scavenged the deck the weekend before the demo crew arrived). We got the macrocarpa posts & beams from Musgroves - we would have been quite happy re-using old posts etc, but the new ones are quite nice :-)

Not long til we put the roof on & have a jolly good knees up to celebrate a whopper of a summer project!

Boggy conditions as the posts go in

Mixing cement, by hand, in the rain - SO much fun!!

Our wee bivvy is about to be dwarfed by a whopper verandah

Lizzie can't quite believe we roped her into this, but nonetheless seems to enjoy long days & hard manual labour...much like walking Te Araroa!

Criss cross stuff going everywhere

A swiss one finger salute? Crusty glove on a warratah

Nessi sets the dust flying as the tops come off the posts at the inaugural 3 York St woodchopping champs

Decking on, beams on - getting there

YIPPPEEEE!

Rafters on - just needs a roof

Hope it's REALLY strong

View from the NW

Cuppa tea & a cold sausage in the sun

The fiddly twiddly bits

Well we're pretty much there - the last coat of varnish on the floor has dried off properly, & we have moved in - momentous! The last few weeks has been a feast of recycling inside the hut - starting with re-using the old roof sarking as interior wall linings, & then all the trim. The fiddly twiddly bits which make a home look nice.  All those hours spent carefully cleaning, stacking, moving & re-stacking all our recycled timber has paid off at last. We even have power & internet too! Not too bad for a wee shed...

Next step is to put the deck & verandah on - another recycling project.

Luka on the ladder - burning off some post cake energy

Nessi hoovering birthday cake

Final coat of varnish

Just after the first coat of varnish - amazing contrast of colours & textures

Gotta love wool!

Mmmm check out the sarking

Nessi finishes off the door frame

Is there life after power tools?

Let me introduce you to some of my new friends. They are incredibly handy friends,  capable of doing all kinds of nifty practical things, stuff that I didn't know even existed 6 months ago! We hang out together lots at the moment. The conversation isn't much to rave about - a one-sided high pitched mechanical drone. What they lack in sociability they make up for in practicality

Here they are in no particular order:

From back in the day when B&D was made in ol blighty - totally solid & dependable. Screams like a banshee sometimes which is always entertaining - if you have earmuffles on

Bargain purchase from a neighbour - just goes & goes & goes til your arms give out, or the sandpaper wears out

As per drill above. Keep thinking it's going to konk out, but just keeps on giving

Another bargain purchase from the neighbour. Is there any job the angle grinder cannot fix? 

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