South Wall

       In Nov 2018 we were lucky enough to have family come and visit who were keen to help build the house. The south wall was started with a row of insulation stuck on, and was cut to fit snugly around the windows. Then the botttom wall channel was screwed right at the base of the wall. In the bottom of this pic you can see the metal cladding which has been cut to fit around the window and is ready to be screwed in place.

Then the bottom row of cladding was screwed on in two pieces. The work was much easier with two ladders, especially since this side of the house has a drop of a couple of metres down to the ground and so is much harder to reach.

       At this stage the boys were working so fast that I was unable to keep up with them with my usual system of taking photos at each stage. All I know is that they cut the pieces of cladding, and screwed them onto the wall so efficiently that they had the whole wall done in two half-days of work.

       On the third day they made a quick trip to the 'local' hardware store to purchase supplies to start putting up the eaves. This was a drive of almost an hour each way, so they made sure they were up early in the morning at 6am to get as much done as possible on the last day. This shows serious dedication! For the eaves they first screwed up metal supports, and cut pieces of fibre cement board to size. This cement board was then slid into the fascia-board channel and screwed to the metal support. Each cement board was connected to the next with a special plastic joiner.

       It was great having someone helping to build the house, and even better that they brought all of their own tools. Their tools were much better than our tools, as we can only afford the cheaper ones. Our helper also knew a lot about building that we didn't know, so it was incredibly helpful. We had no idea how to do the eaves, as this was not included in the kit-home. Thank you so much for saving us when we had reached this difficult stage!

       It was amazing how quickly the work got done with another strong helper or two around. The same work had taken us months to complete on our own, and suddenly it was done in a couple of short days. I didn't know whether to feel despondent that we had previously been so slow, or somewhat happy that we had made progress at all. Sometimes it is difficult when life becomes so busy with work, community commitments and just coping, and then building a house on top of that. I try to tell myself that baby steps are better than no steps at all, and to be ecstatic if any progress at all is being done.