December 2023

          Another job which needed doing was installing the internal doors. We tried to source second-had doors but none of the ones that we came across were the right size for our door frames. Josh bought the doors from Bunnings and he also bought a barn door installation kit as we had decided on a sliding door for the bathroom. The benefit of a sliding door was that you didn't need to have the room to swing open a doo. This would have created a problem, either inside the bathroom which meant there was no room for anything within that swing zone, or outside the bathroom.

Here you can see the door in relation to the whole room and the bedrooms beyond.

2024 March - the next door was one of the bedroom doors. For a hinged door, first you have to install the door frame. This was a kit from Bunnings which came with all the pieces of wood needed, they just needed to be cut to the right length. The door frame needed to be square and plumb, and since the door frame was a little twisted, packers were inserted at intervals around the door to make it perfect,

Here is a close up of the gap between the door frames with the wooden packers. These packers were made from offcuts of marine ply cut to size.

Below you can see the details. There is one piece of wood against the frame, then another piece of wood which is the door stop.

Then the door needed the hole cut in the right place in the right size for the handle to fit in. This door handle was another kit from Bunnings.

2024 April - Another job that needed doing was installing stairs to the deck. First the mini concrete slab (which had been poured into a wooden mould as a way of using the left-over concrete from pouring our footings holes) had to be moved over and buried a little deeper.

Then we got a stair kit from Bunnings which is a black metal support which is exactly the right size for 2 stairs. We got 2 of these. We checked all the Australian building regulations to make sure that the top step and the bottom step were all correct. The metal frame was attached to the concrete slab and also attached to the meta frame of the deck. Then two pieces of wood from Bunnings were attached to make the stair treads. This made it super easy to create stairs, and was pretty cheap too.

Also happening at the same time was more painting of walls. Of course this involved filling screw holes, sanding, prepping, cutting in and primer before the final coats of paint.

 2023 December

          Now that we had finished the bath install, it was time to finally test the hot water system. This had been installed 2 years earlier, in December 2021, when the plumber came and did all the roughing-in of the pipes. It had been patiently waiting all this time, and now was the moment of truth.

          So we turned on the taps and yes water came through - but not hot water. This is a special hot water system design that uses gas to heat the water, and instead of the normal method of igniting the gas by having it plugged into electricity, the actual water flow starts a thing which ignites the gas which then heats the water. Unfortunately this was not working with our system. We did some trouble shooting and first of all we discovered that the internal lithium battery had died. Luckily Josh had a replacement battery of exactly the same obscure size. But then it still didn't work! After some more investigation, it seemed that the problem was most likely that the water pump was not powerful enough to get the system going. Our water pump was quite a few years old and it liked to have its red error light on most of the time - probably not a good sign!

        We had family coming to visit for xmas and really needed a solution for this problem - so Josh took a quick trip to Bunnings to buy a new pump. Here she is newly installed.

     And yes! When the hot tap was turned on with the new pump, out came hot water this time. There is a lag of maybe 30 seconds before the hot water system starts which is a terrible waste of precious tank water. Also the temperature options are burning hot, freezing cold, and if you are lucky you'll get a couple of seconds of something in between the two and a lot of wasted water. Every time you turn the hot tap off and on again you have to wait another 30 seconds for the water to get hot again. This makes washing up very difficult too. I am very disappointed with this type of hot water system. Oh well. Here's what the inside of it looks like, not that I know how any of it works.

          In other exciting news, also in December 2023 we had air conditioning installed. I had imagined the outside box part would be sitting on the ground, and I had spent hours digging the rock-hard dirt under the house so that it was level, and covered it with bue gravel. But it turns out that it's actually better that the unit is installed on the wall, as it discourages rats from chewing the wiring, and snakes from coiling up in the warmth.

          We bought the system from Betta Electrical, and ordered it weeks in advance but still had a lot of trouble getting it when we were promised. We paid around $2000 and we were told that it contained all of the parts that we needed to self install. We were told by numerous people that the only reason that people get certified installers is for insurance purposes. But when we opened the box we discovered that it was missing a lot of parts needed for installation and that we had no option but to get a certified installer. This was the height of summer and rumour had it that all the installers were booked at least weeks in advance. Luckily we were able to get the local guy to come out and install it just before xmas.

          What could have been a relatively quick install straight through the outside wall, instead became a 2 day job when the installer insisted that the best way to circulate the cold air would be through the internal wall between the bedroom and the living room. Maybe he was right but this is such a small house it might not have made that much of a difference. So we paid the installer around $2000 which doubled the cost of air conditioning and made it so much more expensive that it sometimes is a little hard to justify the price. But then we tested it on a hot day, 39 degrees outside and 27 degrees inside. Lovely.

          The good thing about running air conditioning on solar power, is that you want to run it when it's hot and sunny. And that's when you get the most electricity! Another good thing about air conditioning is that it takes the humidity out of the air. So 27 degrees with high humidity feels hot, and low humidity feels cool. Also it stops your house going mouldy which is great. We have to make sure that we turn the air conditioning off around the time of day that the solar panels start getting shade on them, which is usually the same time of day that it starts cooling down anyway. Our other option is to run the generator for extra electricity, but we don't need to do that very often. Air conditioners these days are very efficient, with inbuilt inverters. And our system is also reverse-cycle, so in winter we can turn it on to warm up the house, and don't need to have other forms of heating. Only while it's sunny though!