Bernt and Stacey's Building adventures: Blockwork finished!... For now...

It took us just over 2 months but we have done it! We are finished laying blocks for now; poured our last bucket of concrete yesterday to fill our exterior walls. Yay! We have been remembering the day that Bernt put up the first hurdle (to run string lines off for the block walls). It was 3 metres high and we both looked up with mouths gaping, looked at each other and wondered what we had signed ourselves up for! And that wasn’t even the full height of the walls! We decided that we would do what we could, and if we got to a point where we couldn’t handle it then we would pay someone to finish it off… Well, we did it!

We have, to this point, laid around 2000 concrete blocks and now intimately know the difference between lintel blocks and knock out blocks, as well as having developed favourites. Bernt; the 200mm wide blocks because they are the easiest to level, Stacey; the 150mm wide blocks because they had a smaller surface to mortar. We took on roles; Bernt commandeered the concrete mixer, mixing mortar and getting a real feel for achieving just the right consistency. I was in charge of mortaring, getting very handy with the trowel (and giving my wrists a hell of a work out) and Bernt placed and levelled the blocks. It was hard to decide which was more enjoyable; watching the walls get higher or watching the pallets of blocks disappear.

The exciting courses to lay were the ones which stared to show where windows were going to be, and then most exciting were the courses which finished off the windows, lintel blocks running over the top of temporary framework which we then filled with steel reinforcing and concrete. It was so strange to see the long back wall emerging looking very much like a drawing we once drew… seems like years ago now!

Bernt and Charlie inspecting the workshop windows.

The finished bedroom window.

The back wall with windows all taking shape. Charlie will be very disappointed when we put glass in his favourite look out (aka the bathroom window).

Then we got to finish height of our interior walls (on top of which will sit the mezzanine floor) and filled those walls with concrete. It felt super good to have them finished and solid. We had a bit of a scare just a week or so earlier when, on a very stormy day, we had a big tree come down with the top of its branches landing about 3 metres from the build. We were very lucky; the neighbour lost around 20 huge trees, looked like a cyclone tore through and around the corner a massive tree fell on a house, completely crushing half of it. Luckily it was a holiday home so no one was in it. Our little ger survived unscathed and we thanked our lucky stars!

The interior walls in the apartment after being filled with concrete.

As we started to get higher and higher, we worked on top of a little trolley for a while, adding blocks to stand on to get ourselves up higher until it got to a not so safe looking pyramid. That’s when we invested in scaffolding. We considered renting it but found a really good deal from the mainland and when we weighed up how long we’d need it for and the gaps between each job we decided to buy it. It arrived within a week or so of ordering and it has been great! The deal was for two 3.5 metre high platforms and a free mini fold up scaffold. We can put the two towers on top of each other to get to the apex of the roof (7metres) and we bought extra bracing to make that a safe option.

Bernt standing on our dodgy, pre scaffolding arrangement.

Stacey on one of our new scaffolding towers. Much safer!

We have had quite a few days of nasty weather, either too wet to mortar or too windy to trust the string line. On one of those days we headed into Hobart to talk to a lighting designer. Still waiting to hear back from her with a definitive plan but we have a much better idea of what’s happening now.

We also spent a day visiting all of the local timber mills to work out where to get the timber for our traditional green timber frame. Apparently there is a bit of a shortage in Celery Top Pine, because it’s been the wettest winter in years so the trucks cant get to the forests. So one company had a bit of a monopoly on the logs. After much conversation and negotiation Bernt has decided to jump in headfirst and cut the timber himself. He bought a Lucas Mill (which arrived yesterday). It is a portable saw mill, basically a circular saw which runs the length of a log on tracks and which you can adjust to cut both horizontally and vertically. It was a huge investment but if all goes well it should pay itself off in this one job and then it will be invaluable when we start making furniture. The price of buying logs is $140 per cubic metre compared to buying cut timber at $1800 per cube. Obviously the waste needs to taken into consideration but it is still potentially a saving, plus we get to keep all of the off cuts and can potentially use them for things down the track like building our veranda.

So the Lucas Mill arrived yesterday just an hour or so before we poured our last bucket of concrete into our finished walls. The first truck of logs is due to be delivered on Thursday so it all happened in good time. We haven’t actually finished laying every block, we still have about 5 pallets left (about 700 blocks) but those can’t be laid until the frame is in place. And it sure will be nice to have a break from concrete, I’m happy to exchange sawdust for concrete dust any day!