archives january, february, march 2005
2 0 0 6
Nov the service trench has to be dug which will carry a large flexible conduit. I'll need phone, TV, data, burglar alarm, electricity, intercom cable to be carried. Quite honestly all this digging trnches and paths has been a complete pain in the ass. Wish I'd got a digger in at the very beginning and dug them all then. Lack of experience and planning I guess. I can't believe how much digging I've been doing - and huge piles of muddy laundry. Mud, mud, mud.
jolly green giant steps
Nov can't stand traipsing mud into the place any more. Have to make a path and steps - emergency. Think it will take ten mintues but it takes a week. Whereever we plant our spade there is a huge rock.Look at the pile on the left of the unfinished path. I do my back in and yet another visit to the osteopath. I'm beginning to feel I can track this build simply in terms of pulled and spasming muscles. The steps look great. They're kind of jolly green giant steps made out of Fred flintsone rocks that Anthony, my helper, and I dug out. Here's our before and after pics. We dug the path, then laid geotextile to prevent the weeds ( I had some left from the roof materials), the a layer of sand and then the gravel. It makes a nice crunching noise as you go to the Strawdio.
OCT - After a huge amount of indecision I plumb for 8 inch wide redwood pine boards for my floor, mainly because they are have the kind of colour and tone that I'm after. I want the room to be light and warm and not too heavy. Oak and chestnut floor seemed a little too heavy duty for the rest of the build. My mate Mark Urch comes and we lay it over two days. Its beautiful and absolutely right for what I want. I shall seal it with Polywax - a non toxic treatment from the Green bulding Store.
OC T - time to do my annual roof strim - as specified by Coronet turf who suppied the wildflower Meadow. Quite fun really getting up on the roof and pushing huge armfuls of sweet smelling greenery over the dge. Now its got a haircut and I miss the luxuriant growth that was there before.
SEPT the outside
after its pale dusky pink lime wash
JULY PICS. inside and out, after 1st plaster (and my Mum comes and does a plaster frog !)
August 24th LIME WASHING
Holidays, heavy rain,stting in windswept cafes, recovering from the SBTF (Straw Bale Tired Feelling), and at last down to the LIME WASHING ! The lime wash arrives in large white tubs and when you open them most of the lime has floated to the bottom and congealed in a white paste. So you got to mix them. I started optimistically with a long stick but it took for ever. What worked better was to get a metal clothes hanger and make it into the rough shape of a whisk and stick it into my eletric drill. Apart from a bit of sloshing over my sandals (another pair of jeans ruined!) it did the job well.
Lime washing is strange and lovely, and very different from painting because you don't know what colour you've got until the next day. I had chosen "Dusky Pink" pigment which you mix in to suit. At first (apparently everyone does this) I was a bit tentative because when you put it on it seems very dark. When it dries the next day it s too light. Like getting your photos back - you've got to wait and be patient. In the end I used three different mixes at the same time to get a mottled colour on the outside. First put on the darkest pink and then swashed on some of the light pink, finishing with a few splodges of white. I really enjoyed this. Its like painting on a huge canvas. Oh Yes, and I used a domestic broom with quite a soft brush. That way you can reach the top of the wall and cover large areas very quickly. Its an incredibly messy, broad brush process with huge splots landing all over the place so you need to cover anything you don't want turning to pink. Like your dog.
On the inside
I've made up my own pigment. Drove to the Bristol Sweet Mart and bought
a large bag of Tumeric (about £3) and two small bags of cinnamon
(£3). With Rachel Whitehouse (St Dogmaels Strawbale Queen) on the
other end of the phone doing a similar thing, we had a giggly day putting
together a truly culinary mix. I wanted a wheaty apricot sort of colour.
Here's my mix:
Two
large handfuls of clay mud from the wood
A large cup of Tumeric
Two small packets of cinnamon
A cup of Black organic dark chocolate
I'll put that on tomorrow and hope the building smells of sweet spices.
August
1st
Is there clay in all my technology. My camera's bust, my new phone (with a camera) is bust, and my new MP3 player is bust. And a truck banged into the side of my car. So no pics until they are all back from the menders. I'm on the phone, I'm going from repair shop to shop, I'm packaging - hell, I'm working for my technology. I'm not a free man.
June - helped by a dynamic team of Volunteers, armed with a zillion Black Marigold gloves and many tons of lime putty (premixed by Ty Mawr) we set to.You can mix your own lime but you have to leave it for three months before its ready to use. Ty Mawr will bag it up for you in small handleable bags so that no one does their back in. The first coat you have to kind of push in to the straw to get a good fixing and then "scratch" it ready for the second coat. We're doing two coats on the outside, and three on the inside. The top coat inside is very smooth whereas I quite like the rough finish for the outside. If you have a rough finish inside dust collects on each little granule and this ain't great for electrical equipment.
May 30th - last pic of Strawdio before plastering
May
May ws mostly about getting the Vernda built. This was a new challenge - not something I had ever tangled with before. Bought a job lot of scaffold boards thro the local free ads paper and set about getting all the levels right. Just the kind of detailed work that an improviser/musician like myself hates. Its shaping up great tho - big enough to sleep, party, eat and Band rehears on.
veranda coming together
April
Building a
wall out of stone taken out of the site to hold up the veranda. Thougth
it would take days but it took a week and a half
March
Shuttering up trenches for veranda foundations - I laid cement blocks
and cemented around them.
the pull cord on the whacker plate breaks ! Stripping the bark off a tree with a "spokeshave"
Kev and Pete help me put the tree up inside, which apart from looking
beautiful will help support the very long back wall.
Feb
Putting in electric cable, fusebox etc. Done lots of asking around about how to do this, what to buy etc. In the end I've laid the cables, done the ducting and my neighbour Richard has wired them up for me. I know Richard because his dog Borys has become friendly with mine (Loeke). Borys escapes his house and comes and stays with me whenever he can break out his garden. See the main Pindrop Club website to hear/see Borys and me doing a blues duet. Borys is a great singer and Richard is a top electrician. I am blessed !
Jan 20th
Squishing Sheeps Wool ("Thermafleece") insulation bats between the rafters. More luck than judgement the gap was just tight enough that I didn't have to put up string or something to hold the bats up. The place smells of sheep ! Not cheap either. I think the final bill was around £500. But, hey, lets do this right.
Jan 2006
I've rather lost the plot journalwise over recent months. Got busy with work (click here to see how I've been monkeying around!), and could only squeeze Strawdio passions into small corners. Nevertheless there has been a bit of progress. Got the floor in. Had to take out the half bales (between joists) insulation because the earth beneath the floor stayed damp and was rotting out the bales. Perhaps because there are no deep foundations (trying to leave a small footprint), and natural flow over moisture down the slope goes down underneath my floor. Air gap could've been bigger too. Next time I'd do the same but leave a bigger gap - even might build on posts. So that was a bit disappointing. But the floor is in and it looks like a real room,. And I've put the insulation (Thermafleece) between the ceiling joists. So thats good. And I've glazed one end of the veranda o let light in the far window. That was a bit of a learning curve but the combination of wood, turf and glass looks great - really pleased. Here are some pics to bring things up to date. I apologize for lack of detail but you could always email me here if you want to know more.
.jpg)
Jan 2006 cosy inside pic, ready to insulate Outside
pic, showing glass end of veranda
Rolling out the turf on the roof. The hessian Just after
turf was laid - like a green carpet
were dressed with a layer of topsoil.
Wildflower Meadow turf arrives in rolls topsoil
bagged up and laid on the roof
from www.coronet-turf.co.uk We
laid "leaky pipe" for irrigation
between the bags, made from recycled
car
tyres.
dumper truck arrives with topsoil We used Phoebe
and Kev bagging up the topsoil
ten tons in the end. A lot, huh
Sept 27th
I've put in a "lightpipe". Can't go into detail except thats its quite a magical result. The inside from being quite dark is beautifully lit. Bit if a fiddle to make it watertight since it wasn't really designed for brubber butile pond liner roofs.
Sept 25th
Rolled out the geotextile - white as snow and delightfully easy to lay.
Sept 20th
The pondliner arrived in rolled up sausage which I unravelled on the neighbours lawn. It took 4 of us to lift it growningly onto the roof, and then unroll. Its a bit like lightweight wet suit material and smells kind of nice. Once we'd laid all the neighbours and kids appeared to hang out on it. Something about new surfaces - they need to be sat on. My cat does the same.
September 14th
The carpet was more difficult to source than I had imagined. After many false leads I stumbled on a treasure trove of old carpet when I wandered into Backwell dump on the off chance of finding some. Two guys (Pindrop Club punters coincidentally! ) had just dumped a huge amount of carpet straight froma Community Centre. I paid the dump £5.00 and they let me take the lot in my old trailer. Weighed a ton. With my friend Giovanni we laid it all out, in all its many colours and textures. Giovanni then hoovered it to pick up any little sharp bits. Very domestic scene on the roof.
SEPTEMBER
September has been a busy month , mainly focussing on the roof. Settled on my version of the roof sandwich which is - 18mm plyboard, topped with old carpet, then the pondliner, then a layer of geotextile (thick synthetic wooly stuff to stop roof penetration and sharp things), topped with 5 inches of soil in small hessian sacks, topped with "Wildflower Meadow" turf. Its all got a bit expensive, but then the idea of a wildflower meadow growing up in Spring was more than I could resist. Oh Yes, and its all irrigated with "leaky pipe" (type it into google and you'll get the picture). I want my meadow not to go brown in summer so its got to be irrigated from below.
SEPT 2nd
The wonderful Steve from down the lane brought up the windows he'd made for me. Oh they are so beautiful ! It makes a house a home.
SEPT 1st
August became a blur with no time to catch up on this journal. Trying to keep the Strawdio going and make a living and fit a week away was about as much as I could manage. But its all looking good. The roof is on, and I decided to felt it before putting up the pond liner, mainly because I was fed up with the tarpaulining. Fiddling around with tarps at the end of a long day drives you mad. And then they blow off in the wind. Today I spent a pleasant hour or two giving the internal walls a close haircut with my new Black and Decker hedge cutter. Its the ideal tool! You clip off all the loose bits ready for plastering, and it also gives you an idea of how straight or wonky the walls are. Mine aren't bad, and where there are bulges the seem quite amneable to shifting if you give them a good thump with the "persuader" (a home made wooden sledge hammer)
I've ordered the pond liner for my green roof (around £300), and hessian sacks (search sandbags on the net or you'll never find them) to lay the soil into. A very helpful bloke called John Little (info@greenroof.co.uk) told me that on the slight pitch on my roof (about 5 degrees), the soil would have held without them. I've been down the dump and persuaded the guys there to put aside some old carpets for me - but I had to pay for them! £15 for a rough old batch. Since then I've discovered that Allied Carpets are quite happy for me to go and raid their skip. Told them I was doing a pond. Tell them its a roof and they seem to be less amenable !
Not sure what turf to go for - there's quite a variet available theses days including a very tempting Wildflower Meadow turf. Expensive at £6.00 a sq metre but can you imagine it ! A Meadow roof. Mmmmmm. Oh, and I'm going to put in a "leaky pipe" irrigation system which will be fed from a tank that will collect thge rain water off the roof. Hopefully this will be pumped back up onto the roof by a pump powered by a solar panel.
AUGUST 1st
Banging in the cross beam - to see the finished veranda roof look ahead to Sept 1st !
Mark Urch and I cut a notch in the posts to carry the veranda cross beam - the peg is made from oak.
JULY 24th
My Handyfriend Mark boards out the roof in sunny weather. We used 18mm ply which we will felt over for the winter and possibly get the turf on in the Autumn. Been too busy with Music stuff to do very much so progress is frustratingly slow. Life realities.
JULY 11th
Sinking 24mm thread into rocks found on site to support posts for veranda. Posts donated by the Woodland Trust from our local wood - fallen ash. The idea is that when the turf roof compress the walls the veranda posts will need to need to be lowered as well or the joists might crack under the bending strain. The posts will sit on stainless steel disks and nuts so that the whole thing can be wound down as the walls compress.
