In the frame

First of all, apologies for the odd photo placement and sizing. Blogger isn't playing nicely this evening; it took ages to upload the photos, and then I couldn't get them in the right position or the right size. Never mind; I don't mind the fact that the final photo is huge -- I think it's a really nice one of Iain.

A couple of days ago we finished building the verandah roof, which means...drum roll...
...the framing is now complete.

The building inspector inspected the framing yesterday, and, much to our surprise, it passed.

Above: the finished verandah and the yurt

Below: the front of the house

An embarrassing blot on the landscape: our building site. From left to right: the posts for the yurt deck, a pile of soil and clay dug up when the water and septic tanks were buried, the water tanks (with septic system barely visible in front), blue tarp with the concrete mixer underneath, pile of earth from the slab excavations (front) the caravan (middle) and house (back), pile of hardcore left over from the driveway (front), our car (middle), piles of timber (back), our yurt

The first beam of our yurt deck

Iain takes a break from building the deck

Now that the framing's been signed off we can get on with closing the house in. The roof goes on first, then the cladding and finally the windows.

Today we put in an order for the roof. There's a 2-week lead time on that, so we've now got a couple of weeks during which we can concentrate on building the deck for the yurt. Unfortunately they're forecasting several days of heavy rain and gale-force winds to coincide with our days off at the weekend. We're looking forward to the time when the house is closed in and we're working on the interiror, because the weather won't be able to hold us up then.

Helen

New Year update

This post is brought to you courtesy of Never Mind the Blabbing, Show us the Pictures, Ltd.

 
We've made really encouraging progress on the build over the Christmas break. I've got to start work tomorrow, so Iain will be knocking nails in on his own over the next few days, until he goes back to work himself on Monday.

At the same time as building the house, we're also building a deck for the yurt. Don't let anyone tell you we don't like to make life complicated!

Iain fixes the yurt deck posts in place before we pour the concrete

What with the verandah posts and the yurt deck posts, Iain calculated that we've mixed and poured 2.2 tonnes of concrete since we bought our little concrete mixer!

Me cleaning the concrete mixer 'apres pour'. Glamorous, eh?!

Iain attaches a rafter on the verandah...

...and now it's my turn.

We're very close to completing the framing for the verandah now. We finished fixing the rafters today and tomorrow Iain's going to make a start on the purlins (the cross-pieces). Once they're done we'll be able to call the building inspector in to check the framing. Once we've passed the inspection, we can get the roofers in to put the roof on - that will be a real milestone!

Right, I'm off to do some yoga before bed. Night, all.

Helen