More Painting
     We chose the colour Twill which is a kind of light grey with hints of blue or purple depending on the light.

Here you can see the difference with the white undercoat - the darker sections are the Twill cut-ins at the edges and where the sheets of plywood join. The top part hasn't been done in this photo yet as it requires going up a ladder.

Here you can see Twill is the top colour on this colour card from Bunnings.

Here's the kitchen.

These are the rollers I was using, they give a great finish.

Here you can see the difference between the traditional large roller and the little one. The large one is too difficult for me to press against the wall but the little one is so easy to use, I love it!

More painted walls. I was doing a section of wall at a time, each coat took a few hours for each section and then a couple of hours between coats. This meant that it took a few days at least to do each section. It took extra time before and after each session of putting up the painting sheets, mixing the paint for at least 5 minutes and then cleaning the paint off the roller and tray afterwards. The clean up was the worst part of the job.

One coat of primer and two coats of twill.

Next step, kitchen cupboards.

 Back in November 2021 the support bars were attached to the house floor frame, and in June 2023 I noticed they were looking a bit rusty, so I set to work to try and keep them in good condition for the future.

I got my hands on a few likely looking products, mostly second hand partly used products. This one is like an acid, very runny.

The metal turns a dramatic black when it converts the rust. It left a funny mark when it dribbled on the galvanised floor supports, probably not good.

This one is like a paint.

It's a pretty grey colour.

And then I got this primer.

And then I got this top coat that is exactly the same colour as our Colorbond trim.

It looks fantastic finally finished!

I think there's still a few waiting for me to get the final coat on, one day when I'm not busy doing other things...

 Painting the Internal Plywood Walls - 2023 May

     Before painting I had to sand the walls, just a quick-once over to prepare the surface. We had belt sanders, both one that you plug into 240v and one that we put a Ryobi battery in, but they were too large and aggressive for this purpose. We had the Ryobi battery-powered multi-tool which came with a small triangular sanding head and special size pieces of sandpaper that fit, but that was too small to do entire walls with. So we bought a Ryobi battery-powered "palm sander" which was perfect for the job.

          I made myself a special bespoke rig to catch the dust, by attaching the Ryobi battery-powered hand vacuum through a washing machine drain hose, a piece of aluminium bent to the right shape, and some duct tape. By the way, whilst I do like most of the Ryobi products, I do not recommend this vacuum. It is not worth any money as it has little power and always immediately blocks the filter within about 10 seconds of starting to use it.

          Safety equipment was safety glasses and ear muffs. At least my ears were being kept warm on those frosty mornings!

      When I wasn't using the vacuum to keep the dust under control, I wore a very good dust mask. You don't want to put ANYTHING in your lungs, but especially not the dust from treated wood.

          2023 September - We bought some paint which is the undercoat and the primer, and the topcoat was a colour called Twill, just the most common stuff from Bunnings.

          After giving the walls a wipe down with a damp cloth, I painted all the edges and the joins with a brush.

 I used a special cutting-in brush which was AMAZING and I highly recommend. It has an angled cut across the top of the bristles and this lets you paint exact lines at the edges. If you are careful enough you might not need to stick masking tape and newspaper around the edges.

          Something I noticed in the above photo is the holes cut for the plumbing and the electrical wiring. As Josh was cutting and screwing the plywood walls up, he was measuring where the power points and light switches were going to go, and cutting out the right size holes in the right place, and threading the wires through, ready for when the electrician comes back to connect them. Also the water pipes and the gas pipe had to have nice round holes cut to fit in exactly the right place. He did a great job with these tricky details.

          Also in the top left corner you can see that there is still silver sisalation as that section did not yet have the plywood screwed up yet. I was painting what I could as Josh worked in sections around the house.

          Then I painted the walls with a roller. I started with a full-size 30cm roller but found it was very painful to grip with my hands, as you actually have to push quite hard against the wall to get the paint out of the roller and onto the wall, filling in all the little crevices in the wood. So I changed to a small 10cm roller and found that it was fantastic to use. much easier. Also I added a stick to make it longer, so that I could paint the tops of the walls 

        Another thing I loved about the small roller is its fantastic little roller tray, with a special end to catch any drips. Much easier to clean too, which is the most annoying part of painting!

          But that was only the base coat - two more coats AND cutting-in to go!

 2023 May

Winter was approaching and we wanted to create a smaller space so that it was easier to be warm in winter. We had discovered by living in the caravan that a small space is actually surprisingly easy to keep warm. Just by our body heat alone, along with jumpers and blankets, we had been comfortable in near zero temperatures. The caravan is under the trees though, and the trees act like a mice warm blanket over the land, so at night the temperatures stay much warmer in comparison to the cleared area around the house. When there are no trees then the warmth of the day just rises up into the sky and it gets much colder much faster. Around the caravan there is never a frost, but down in the clearing we have had quite a few frosts each winter.

We cleared the area where the house is due to bushfire regulations. If it is clear at least 33m around each side of the house, we achieved Bushfire Attack Level 29, which is basically medium level. So while we have safety from bushfire, we also have much colder winter nights. We don't have any form of heating in the house, so the best plan was to just try and create the smallest space to take advantage of our body heat. First step was putting up a ceiling in the first bedroom, as it received winter sun and had all the walls insulated and clad with plywood.

First the ceiling battens had to be put up. These are blue metal which has two sides which are screwed to the roof trusses, and then the middle bit sticks down ready for the ceiling sheets to be screwed to. The photo below shows that there isn't enough room to screw two plywood sheets next to each other. If the screws were any closer to the edge of the plywood, then the wood would split. This means that any point where two sheets join there needs to be an extra wide ceiling batten.

 Josh made these up out of some spare roof truss offcuts we had leftover. The below photo shows the wide batten on the left and the regular ceiling batten on the right.

Another thing we had to figure out was how far apart to put the ceiling battens. After some research we decided that 300mm seemed to be the best distance. This means that with 9 screws along the long edge and 5 rows across, there has to be 45 screws in each sheet. In the below photo you can see the normal ceiling battens on the left side, an extra wide batten at the right-hand end of the plywood sheet, and a gap where the extra ceiling batten hasn't been screwed up yet.

It's a bit tricky lifting a 2.4m long sheet of plywood that weighs about 12 kilograms over your head, up to ceiling height, and holding it exactly in place, predrilling a hole with the drill and then holding a screw and the impact driver and screwing it in - again and again until it stayed up by itself. Whilst balancing yourself and the tools on the ladder. And then screwing in the rest of the 45 screws. Climb down, move the ladder, climb up again, screw in a few more screws, climb down again, move the ladder... etc etc. And then again for the next sheet. We could have hired, borrowed or bought a sheet lifter which could have made the job easier, but these are quite large so they are difficult to transport. Also the sheet lifter would have taken up a lot of room in the house and gotten in the way. Josh was sure that we didn't need one.

Our solution was to have me holding up the sheet with a broom at one end while Josh went up the ladder at the other end and attached some clamps to hold it in place. In the above photo you can see the bags of insulation being temporarily stored in the ceiling. Each single bag contains multiple bags inside, and then each bag is tightly squeezed and sucked shut. When you cut the bag open, air rushes back into the material and it expands hugely. It will go from being maybe 30cm wide to 2 metres wide, it's crazy! They must have really big strong machines that squish these down when they get wrapped. It's a great idea because it saves SO much space when it is being transported and stored.

The below photo shows the second ceiling sheet screwed in place.

The below photo shows the third ceiling sheet in place. The black marks are from the rubber mallet banging it in over the tight gap above the frame for the built-in wardrobe. You can also see in the photo the extra ceiling batten has been added on the right, and a short piece of plywood added at the end to start closing this short side in.

The below photo shows two more long thin pieces of plywood screwed up to fill in the short side of the ceiling.

Here's a photo from the other side of the room.

Now the room is ready to start working towards painting. As you can see these walls have already been filled, with all those funny white spots. Next update coming soon!

Solar System

2023 February 

    Installing a solar system is pretty complicated, so Josh did a lot of research to make sure that everything was safe and legal. First we needed somewhere under the house to put the connectors that come out of the batteries, and turn the power into something useable. Here is the metal box which has been attached under the house, ready for installing the inverter and other associated paraphernalia. This box is actually a gun safe from Bunnings, as it was a reasonably priced and suitable sized metal box which was readily available. Hanging down in front of it you can see the wiring that the electrician put in during the electricity rough-in. It was placed here ready for connecting to the solar system in June 2022. This would sit and wait for a while before more action happened to it.

     Josh continued putting up the plywood walls and the kitchen looked pretty good. I was working on filling the gaps on the walls as Josh was working on putting up more walls.

     We discovered some of the trickier parts of this material. It didn't like to lay perfectly flat and some sheets stuck out from the sheet next to it by quite a few millimetres.

It was time to try and find a good wood filler. I wanted something that was able to be sanded and painted, but was also had a bit of flexibility in it so that it wouldn't crack when the wood moved. This was one of the products I tried. Also I was hoping that it would be easy to apply into tricky places. This product was very light, as it seemed to have been whipped with lots of air like a mousse. I didn't like it enough to buy it again, especially at nearly $15 for a pretty small amount.

Another product we tried was Spakfilla. It was $12 for a much larger amount. They say on the pack that if it gets a bit hard you can just add a bit of water to get it soft again, which really doesn't seem like something that you want to be having in your walls.

Every screw hole needed to be filled, and they looked like this before filling. They had to be cleaned up of all the splinters around them before filling, so I used a stanley knife or a sander to get them neat and tidy. Also the ones that weren't quite deep enough had to be screwed in a bit further, so I pulled out the drill for that.

And they looked like this after filling. You can see in this shot that I have been sanding the joins between sheets to try and make them flat. This was difficult as the plywood has such thin layers that when sanded, it revealed the layer below it. I had already learned this when sanding the plywood laid down for the floors. Also the plywood would flex when the sander was pressed on it, and then bulge back out when the sander was removed, so it was impossible to get flat joins. Ah well.

This wall alone would have taken a few hours to fill all the holes and the gaps. Easy enough until I had to be crawling around on the floor for the bottom ones, and then up and down the step ladder to reach the top ones, and trying to remember to take everything that I needed with me each time I went up, including knife and drill if needed. For application I tried the spakfilla tool which is a plastic rectangle, and also a flexible knife. Each had its own advantages and disadvantages.

 Then I sanded off the filler to try and make the wall lovely and smooth. I wasn't happy with this product which refused to sand down to a thin layer, instead just removing itself from the area completely and revealing the screw once it was sanded down a little bit. I think it was the Nordsjo expensive mousse one.

Time to try yet another product. This polyfilla was about $17 from Bunnings, but the pack in this picture is an old one I found somewhere.

This wall corner looked a bit of a mess after I tried to fill it in nice and smooth.

Here's an example of a tricky corner join I was filling. It was difficult to fill such narrow gaps and took ages for each section.

I went back and tried again the method of mixing sawdust with wood glue as a filler. It was not very good as it had a lot of shrinkage and then dried very hard and was extremely difficult to sand.

Here is yet another product I tried in the elusive search for a good wood filler.

Here is a pic of me from July 2023 with the sander, continuing to work on the walls a bit more each day.

Yet another product being tested. I mustn't have liked it because I didn't buy it again.

Wait there's more. No I didn't like this one either.

I had added some more safety equipment for the heavy duty sanding, I didn't want to breathing in the plywood or the filler.

My favourite wood filling product by far was the Polyfilla Large Cracks, I even went back and bought a few more of these they were so good. So by my count I tried 8 different fillers before deciding on a good one.

Next time we will be putting up the first ceiling, in May 2023.