More Wall Frames Erected

     This morning the boys went down to the house site and did some more building work. There was already two wall frames assembled so they put the third and last frame together.

     This is the wall for the kitchen and bathroom, and they then erected it. It was a little dicey with the wind randomly gusting through but luckily Nic didn't get blown away.

     The next wall was the living room wall, which has a ridiculously large window. I vote we put the couch right in front of it and sit on it all day watching the birds.

     Last was the wall which has the sliding glass door in it. This will open out onto a small verandah.

     As you can see on the top right corner the local inspector Mr Kookaburra came to show his appreciation, very impressed with the new place to sit.

New Wall Frames

Two more wall frames have been assembled and are ready to be stood up and attached.

The nearer frame is the doorway where the glass sliding door will go, and the further frame is the living room window, which is extra large and low down, so will provide us with great views. We have been having some gusty winds so will wait for them to die down before erecting these frames!

First house wall frames erected.

          Yesterday the boys erected the first house walls. It only took an afternoon to get the 3 walls strapped, erected and braced.

     Shortly afterwards we were hit with a massive storm dropping 50mm in less than an hour, luckily the frames still looked good the next morning! They are surprisingly noticeable, the bright blue colour very pretty from every angle. They are also quite visible from the road too, letting us know just how visible the finished house will be from the road. Apparently the window openings are quite large, which is good cos it means that we will have a great view of them of the beautiful bush around us.
          Next step will be assembling the next walls frames and erecting them. Hopefully they will be quite quick and easy, although the weather forecast is for rain, of course!

Second Wall Frame

     The second wall frame has been partially constructed, this is a big one as it covers the entire 6 metres from one side of the house to the other, at the bedroom end.

     There are no windows in this wall so it is relatively simple, and the windows for the bedrooms are on the other walls. This works out better as the view through the end wall would just be looking at the water tank anyway.

First wall frame

     Once again I returned home to discover that magical building work had been done.

 

     The first wall frame was completely assembled in one day by Josh on his own, all very smoothly until the top plate refused to fit onto the other pieces. The next frame will be assembled with a slightly different method, to try and reduce the problems with the metal warping out of a straight line. Also the purchase of a rubber mallet will help make the pieces behave themselves. If in doubt, bang it out!

Floor screws finished

     Today the yellow-tongue flooring had all of its screws and joins finished. I have been lucky enough to be getting home from work to find the work magically completed :)

     It has taken a few days of hard to work to finally get all of the screws in place, with some delays and frustrations due to problems with tools not working properly. You would think with 3 drills we could get one of them to work! At least 5 days have been spent down there drilling all the screws in, as each full size sheet of yellow-tongue needs 36 screws (4 across each joist and spanning 9 joists), and extra screws needed when joining shorter sections, so the whole floor needed about 600 screws altogether. The lengths of dark wood planks seen in the above photo is the merbau decking waiting for the verandah floor to be constructed, and are being stored on the house floor at the moment to clear up some room in the shed.

     The joins between the sheets of yellowtongue were also sealed with construction adhesive, and then the joins were taped over with insulation tape.

     We have also received the plans for constructing the wall frames, so we can finally get onto that step. Weather permitting, of course!

Yellowtongue Floor

     Josh has now finished attaching the yellowtongue floor to the floor frame.

     In this picture you can see the box of screws, tube of glue/sealant, and the drill, along with the yellowtongue sheets partially finished. It took 2 days of Josh working on his own to put all the yellowtongue down. They now just require a little more glueing and screwing, and then the next stage is wall frames. First we need to wait for the kit home company to send us the missing plans, it's been several days and still waiting for a reply...