ding dong merrily on high

We're getting there!
















We went up to the block yesterday to get a run-through of the solar electricity system, which is now connected and fully functional! AND... Michael signed off on the Biolytix sewage system as well. Apparently we have to "innoculate" the system for a couple of weeks before the installers come back with the worms and microbes, which is a posh way of saying that we need to use the toilet properly for a while to give them some food! Darling daughter had the honour of being the first innoculator (although I don't suppose in years to come she'll thank me for announcing that!). I had a moment of panic when there didn't seem to be any water in the toilet, but of course it was the first time it had been used and water had to travel along the pipes from the tank. Phew.

The above photo is of what will be my studio, complete with dearest husband standing in front of the new sink unit (very nice). My printing bench will be next to it shortly, serving as a temporary storage/food prep area until we move into the main house.






















Now that we have a working solar system we also have ceiling fans and lights! The recessed lights are 21W LED lights that look a lot like halogen down lights but aren't... much more energy efficient and 'green', and 3 times the price, but never mind. Because of the relatively high ceilings we're not expecting them to light up the place in a dazzling sort of way, and in any case we prefer task-oriented lighting so I have 2 vertical fluorescent tubes above my printing bench and plenty of plugs for lamps, which I will have to convert to using LED bulbs.





















This shows the small bathroom in its glory. We've chosen amazingly cheap dark grey floor tiles and flat white matte wall tiles. The vanity unit was cheap(ish) but smart (drawer unit is on the floor in the front of the first photo), and the fittings were on sale, as were all the ceiling fans! The ceiling fans are all reversible so that we can draw down warm air from the ceilings in the winter, and they were reduced in price by over $100 so we bought all 10 that we need for the house, thereby saving ourselves over a $1,000 dollars!

The savings in the ceiling fans and the floor tiles will - hopefully - accommodate the extra we're going to be spending in some other areas such as wine storage. We went up the other day to meet someone about the cool room, and he turned out to be a brilliant source of pragmatic advice and creative ideas. Now we don't need a huge cool room and were planning to place it diagonally in a square space so that we could fill the rest with wine storage, but our friendly refrigeration specialist (I'll call him Martin but I'm embarrassed to say I can't remember his name. Oops!) suggested making the cool room square, to fill the space, because it will reduce costs and maximise materials by avoiding cutting into the standard-sized sheets of wall/insulation that they use. However, he's shown us a way of using one side of the cool room as a partitioned wine cellar and - here's the fun part! - cutting access into the front of it i.e. from the dining room side of the wall, with snazzy glass doors so that it looks like a swanky commercial wine storage display. Wow! What a great idea, and I could see darling husband's eyes light up at the thought. Additionally, darling husband came up with the equally jazzy idea of using a coiled copper pipe running vertically through the cool room from the exterior water tanks to cool the water on the way through and dispensing it via a dedicated 'drinking water tap' on the pantry side of the wall, above the sink, and thus making great use of the available refrigeration to get cool drinking water and obviating the need for a fancy zip tap.

The only downer is that the kitchen people who gingerly made their way up the muddy track (we'd had a LOT of rain again) to the house still can't see what I'm getting at about the central kitchen storage/island units and so I still don't have anyone lined up to build them, and that could be a bit of a problem.

Advent Calendar

It's been a little while since I posted any pictures, but there's been a lot going on! I had hoped to be able to put some more photos up of the interior of the office/studio building that we're moving into in a few weeks' time, but the painters were up there today and everything had been shrouded in protective plastic so it didn't look very photogenic... the upside to that is when we're next up there the shrouds will have come down and the paint will be dry! Meanwhile, we've been busy chosing LED light fittings and thinking about the kitchen in the main house.

Tomorrow we'll be up at the block all morning: Michael will be supervising the sewerage people as they dig the trenches (and the big hole) for our Biolytix system which is being connected, and after I've dropped darling daughter off at school I'll be joining him to meet a local kitchens company to talk about interiors and measure-up.

















This view is slightly out-of-date as the support timbers for the front verandah have now gone up, as you'll see in subsequent photographs. But it gives you an idea of what the completed house will look like from the office/studio!
















This photograph is taken from the top of the slope in front of the front door (which you can just see on the very left hand edge of the shot, draped in plastic to protect it). The verandah shades the huge stacking glass doors of the main living area. The large 'planter box' made of besa bricks on the left side of the verandah as you look at it here will be lined and turned into a pond. The smaller one you can see on the right side of the verandah, just in the shot, will be planted up with culinary herbs.





















The 'pond' will be over 3m long! We'll be putting native fish in it to eat the mosquito larvae.

















Under the special render on what will be darling daughter's bedroom is a special foam block insulation: easy to construct, very well insulated, and coated with a solar-proofed paint... once we decide on colours!

















Remember our comments about the outline foundations in a previous post making the place feel small...? Not any more! This is a view down on the roof of the main house with 74,000 litres of water tank at the back of the house. It's huge.






















I took this photo half way up one of the drainage benches at the rear of the property because I wanted to see the effect of the 'pop-up' roof. The clerestory windows are louvred to allow a free flow of air through the house as we won't have air-conditioning.





















The solar panels are going up on the arrays, as well as on the shed roof.











































This is what the house looks like from the bottom of the block, next to the arrays. Although the benches in the hillside appear quite stark against the green I don't think the house intrudes too much into the landscape.
















And this is what both buildings look like from the bottom of the driveway. In a couple of years' time, when we've planted around the house, they will almost disappear...

Plaster of Progress

MORE progress... We went up there on Sunday morning, once I'd collected dearest husband from the airport, and to our astonishment we found two utes up there, with one person fixing cladding panels on the rear wall of the office/studio where we'd had to move a window, and another inside doing the waterproof membrane in the bathroom! Talk about dedication to the cause; fantastic!

























Inside the office/studio the walls have now been plastered. I think the different colours indicate joins between panels and the location of the P50 (?) shadow moulding around the doors and windows. I don't like architraves or cornicing (except in historic buildings) which is why we're having the P50 moulding instead around the doors and windows and a "square set" finish around the tops of the walls. In here we're also having a skirting board as a sort of test run because I hate the damned things... the problem is a) it's cheaper to have a skirting board because it means that the plastering around the bottom of each wall doesn't have to be so accurate and b) a skirting board protects a potentially delicate lower edge to the wall from things like over-enthusiastic vacuuming. I don't care as much about the office/studio as I will care about the interior of the main house so we're trying it out, with the proviso that if I really object to it, we could instead put a piece of hardwood around the bottom of the walls with a P50 shadow moulding above it, which would mean a flush finish and a shadow line but no protruding skirting board. Why not do this in the office/studio? Because it costs a lot more!





















The main house now has a roof which changes how it feels standing inside at the moment. You get a real sense of the internal dimensions of the rooms now, and it's just great. In the photo you can see the stacks of foam that will form the rear walls of the house: it's self-insulated, if you see what I mean, and so thermally efficient and reasonably priced. The foam pieces are glued together and then covered with a special external render (and we haven't chosen the colour yet). Against the frame you can just see the windows which have also arrived. While the main effort is definitely in getting the office/studio finished there is also a push to get the exterior of the house finished before Christmas. None of the internal partitioning or plastering will be done, but hopefully the walls, cladding, windows and front door will go in so that it is at 'lock up' stage by Christmas.

One of the advantages of working like this is that we'll be able to trial some things in the office/studio before committing ourselves in the main house. For example we have just chosen some floor and wall tiles for the office/studio bathroom, as well as the tapware and bathroom fittings. If we like them we'll use them throughout the main house as well. I'm also about to choose the paint colour for my studio and we'll have the chance to live with it and see it in different lights before using it anywhere else.

What else? Well finally, after doing a lot of jumping up and down last week, it seems as if we are making some progress with the mortgage. Put it this way, mentioning the word ombudsman seems to have had an effect! Suddenly we have letters and extra forms to be filled in and promises of immediate action. Fingers crossed that money could appear in people's bank accounts by the end of this week... meanwhile we've stumped up some more of our own cash to get things going with the sewerage people, and the first actual solar panels have gone up on the roof of the shed. It's very exciting!

Friday 13th November - progress report!

I always consider a Friday 13th date to be good luck instead of bad luck, as my divorce was finalised on a Friday 13th! Anyway, dearest husband and I went up to the block on Friday, before his departure for LA yesterday lunchtime, to see what was what and we were very impressed.

The panorama isn't done with fancy software but I think it gives an idea of how the house is going to sit in the landscape, which is the part of the building process I find difficult to imagine without the reality sitting in front of me. What you can't see (because I didn't take any photos this time) is how the studio blends in with its surroundings from a distance, which makes me feel good about how the house isn't going to stand out horribly either. Yes, it will be shiny and new, but it won't be brutal, and in fact you won't be able to see much of it until you're on the driveway. I like that.






















The roof trusses are obviously on, and this makes the overhangs apparent now. We don't need a huge overhang because the sun won't be shining directly into the windows, but it will give us a bit of protection against the rain. There are long slim louvered windows that sit high under the eaves and they'll stay open in a storm without the rain coming in (unless we have horizontal rain, which isn't unheard of around here... in which case I'll be closing them up tight!).






















M's data cabling is in...


















And while we were there the plasterers were just beginning to board up the insides ready to start plastering! We've been down to Bunnings to get paint charts and now need to make up our minds what the insides are going to look like. While we were at it, we also chose floor and wall tiles for the studio's bathroom. In some ways I think the studio is going to be a case study for the main house: we'll get a chance to view our choices in real rooms with the light shifting during the day. I wonder if we'll change our minds for the main house? If we like the bathroom tiles we've selected we'd like to use them throughout... I guess we'll wait and see.

Superstar!

I picked up darling husband from the airport yesterday morning and together with dearest daughter (who has been so stressed out with all of our moving around that she was granted an exceptional day off school by her teacher in order to spend some time with daddy) we went for a drive up to the block. And this is what we saw when we got there!






Do you see the similarities with the model I built from the plans last year?




















It's fantastic to see the building clad in Zincalume and with the windows in place...














The silver cladding is really funky!





The bank of gel batteries in the shed that will store our solar power until we need to use it












One of two ground mounted solar arrays that will track the sun


Here's the other one with darling husband next to it, to give a sense of scale!








Things seem a lot more 'real' now the physical structures are going up, and we are really excited. It's all made a lot more pertinent given our current renting situation. For those that haven't been following my DoubleElephant blog, the sorry tale in brief is that after weathering weeks of uncertainty and disruption owing to fractured water pipes in the lovely house we're renting (including having to move out to emergency accommodation for two weeks and then back in again), our landlady has told us we can't continue our contract beyond the beginning of January... It's been highly stressful and I am currently investigating our options, in the sense of whether we have any recourse to a tenancy tribunal with regard to the fact that we haven't had full or peaceful enjoyment of the property during our rental contract.

That's another story, I guess, but what has been exercising our minds is what the *&^% we do now that we can't stay in the rented house? At this point I'd like you to put your hands together for wonderful Warren, our builder. Despite all the shenanigans with our mortgage he's been solidly behind us and is, in fact, suggesting that he can complete the studio building before Christmas so that we could move in there for a few months until the main house is finished. What a star!

Baaa

I believe I'm right in saying that our mortgage company has finally received our completed mortgage documents. These documents are the FOURTH SET of documents to be issued by our mortgage provider.

Goodness knows what happened to the first set; our local mortgage broker allegedly sent the second set off to us while we were away but it never arrived (it was posted, not couriered, so may yet appear at Dad's place if the UK postal strike ever stops!); the third set was sent off by the mortgage company directly to Michael in Dublin but I found the fourth set at home when I got back from holiday, signed it, had it witnessed and also sent it off to him in Dublin so that he could sign it and get it witnessed and send it back directly to the mortgage company...

When you consider that we first went to see them on July 30th, it took until 10th September to get an approval letter out and that the date on the fourth set of documents was 24th September but that they returned to base on 2nd November, you can see it's been a slightly stressful time of waiting for us and for our superstar builder!

Good news!

All the best things happen while I'maway, I'm convinced of it... There's a conspiracy there somewhere!

I rang home yesterday and Michael told me that not only has our mortgage been approved (phew!) but our solar rebate has also been approved. This means that we will get back 50% of the money we're paying out for our solar electricity system, and I can't tell you what a relief that is. For starters, we're intending to put the rebate straight back into our mortgage to reduce our monthly payments, so this is REALLY good news.