The Importance of Being Idle

When we started up this blog/build earlier this year, the average house price in Auckland was around $700,000; the local paper reported last week that the average house price is now around $828,000. This little bit of news proved to be a bit of a morale booster, a reminder of why we're doing this, especially in light of the speed bump we hit about seven weeks ago.

Let's back up a bit. At the last report, we had completed the framing. To help brace and weatherproof the structure, we tacked our plywood cladding in place. Good friends came to help us with the process, which meant we had the whole thing done in a day. Thanks, good friends!

How to accurately measure around a wheel well: stick Steff in there!

Steff's claustrophobic POV

Worksite health and safety always comes first when the skill saw is in use.

Sticky nasty bitumen paper goes up

We only attached the plywood temporarily, because it had to come back off at such a time as we were ready to put our windows in place. Ah, the windows. Our first major drama.

We knew that the windows would take a while to produce, because the manufacturers had informed us we'd have a two-week wait after they were custom-measured and ordered by a member of their staff. But upon ordering, our two-week wait became a five-week wait. This was a bit disappointing, given that we had picked up some momentum as we'd worked on the framing, but Steff was due to be out of town on a course for three weeks, so we'd have been short a pair of hands anyway. Steff's course was about an eight hour drive from home. Because we were short of work to do on the house, and we weren't shackled to our city rental payments any more, we realised we had the freedom to take some time to explore the country on the way down. ROAD TRIP!

Wild horses

Sunset/moonrise (click to enlarge)

Post-road-trip, Nancy drove home to Auckland, and she and her father picked up what work they could without windows. Installing the roof and finalising the cladding were contingent on window installation. Because the roof couldn't be installed without the windows, the building wasn't yet watertight. And because it was raining inside the house, none of the interior fit-out could be started either. It was at this point that they realised the hole for the door was too small...

Taking to the old doorway with a hand saw

We also made a start on the stairs, which thoroughly did our heads in. 

It looks easy, but it took us about four full days before this tangle of plywood began to resemble a staircase.

The stair-tops aren't in place yet, because the timber for them isn't treated, and rain features heavily in our
interior design at this stage.

Meanwhile, Steff was learning to make amazing things.

I attended a month long internship at Koanga Institute, well-known for their fantastic work saving heritage seeds and fruit trees of NZ.

We delved into "Appropriate Technology", which our tutor, Tim Barker, defined as: technology which is human-centred and human-scaled; easy to understand and replicate; focusing on locally available resources; requires labour input to create but is energy-efficient and affordable.

Used metal drums are an abundant resource that can be reused in
 many projects

We studied passive heating and cooling; climate-appropriate house design; home-scale biochar production; super efficient rocket stove wood burners; water pumps; human powered machines; small scale solar, hydro and wind power; and appropriate biotechnology - biological greywater systems and composting toilets.

Large scale solar oven getting lots of food cooked.

We built a huge solar oven for the institute which acts as a free slow cooker whenever the sun is shining. Using the same principles we made a solar hot water system. We set lots of things on fire and built a rocket stove-powered cooktop.

Home-scale TLUD biochar burner and 30 minute cookstove.
Transform small batches of waste bones and wood into a soil
amendment while making a hot breakfast and coffee outdoors!

Guts of a rocket stove - super efficient wood-burning
technology with wide applications.

Gardening, soil stewardship, nutritious food, voluntary simplicity and learning to live with healthy community relationships were constant background conversations. Living, working and learning with like-minded people, all choosing to take positive action in response to our current ecological, economic and social challenges, was an inspiring and motivating experience.

Stay tuned for updates about how we are applying appropriate technology in our house and around the farm. For those interested we'll have detailed posts when our solar oven, rocket powered BBQ, solar hot water system, greywater, composting toilets get up and running.

-Steff

Meanwhile, back in Auckland, around four and a half weeks after ordering the windows, we hadn't yet heard anything from the company, despite us contacting them regularly. Having paid a (large) deposit, we started to get a bit nervous. Nancy called the suppliers, who admitted they had forgotten to put our order through in the first place. They informed us it would be yet another two weeks before we received our windows. However, after a call to the director of the company and a request for a refund, our windows magically turned up within a few days.

Between placing our order and having our windows ready to install was essentially seven weeks of down time. Before we started our build, people had warned us that there would be times where progress was frustratingly slow, and this was one of them. Despite being available to continue with our project during those seven weeks, we had no option but to watch as warm, sunny autumn days turned to persistent rains.

There's good news, though. After those seven weeks, this happened:

Before...

After!

The Quest Quotient by Nancy Howie and Steff Werman is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at thequestquotient2011.blogspot.com.