Put a lid on it!

In no time at all, well, between showers and high winds, Chris the wonder roofer had the iron on.

And I put the first two layers of the front fascia on.

Badly fitting glasses obligatory.

Then comes the battens for under the eaves. Looks wrong but hopefully it'll work.

More fun and games! Building permit calls for 6mm cement sheet, so thats what it gets. Seems easy enough, but try working out the angles on the sides of those wedge shape pieces. fitting straight lines into compound curves is not easy. It took a day and a half of thinking and calculating and a bit of trial and error before we got it sussed.

This is after about two hours...

...and by the time our arms couldn't lift any more we'd come about a third of the way around.

Meanwhile the last of the aluminium strips for the window frames were drying

and the slow job of fitting the glass continued.

Interior ceiling framing is a rainy day job.

Call in the troops!

And so we did. With a super human contribution from Matt Francis and some clever use of dishwashing liquid we got those suckers up where they needed to be.

until we had a version of the statue of liberty.

I then called in a local carpenter to do the tricky stuff, and in no time we had the framing completed. Temporary roof back on the bathroom area as the rains have decided to hang around a lot more than I would like. Still, nearly there.

All that remained now was to bring the walls right up to the top of the battens, for a strong and fireproof seal. For this difficult task I called on the specialist talents of one Lynn MacLennan, who I must admit made the difficult job look easy.

Michelle took on the fun job of fitting bricks into the odd shaped corner bits....

.......and I ate a muffin.

I can take you higher

So up we go, over the door and down the other side. Metal meets mud.

and in goes the final window frame.

just one bit missing.

that bit

oh yeah there was a bit of a storm somewhere along the way there. Thats what I call ominous cloudage.

here we go again.

and on the plus side, the arrival of the roof beams means theres only one small job to do before the place is weatherproof. One teeny tiny small job. Coupla days!

carry on

One month on and the lower front walls are complete. There's still another row of windows to go right across the top.

Front doorframe installed and some tricky sloping curved lintels. Enough to make your hair turn grey.

   

  

 

Yeah it's hot.

So over the Christmas break I had some help from a very handy man and we made good progress on the kitchen wall.

and with the arrival (finally) of some more bricks Michelle got started on the back wall.

I carried on around the corner and along the front wall. Yeah, I thought the windows would speed things up. I was wrong.

Here's a long view from the living area toward the kitchen area.

Did I mention the heat? 37 degrees today. Wet towel on the head and carry on.

Mud. And sticks.

some of the visitors in our garden

photos  of mine of some of the little visitors in our garden. planting the flowers first up has meant that the bugs all came in, which brought the birds in. Now that the growth on the wattles is a bit bigger we get loads of the bigger birds too. Love it!       M

eastern spinebill

a native bee

yellow-tailed black cockatoo

crimson rosellas

wdge-tailed eagle

blue wrens- a juvenile and a female

a jeuvenile and adult koookaburras

little cranky wombat

a swamp harrier...awesome!

silvereye

cranky-pants

tree creeper

leopard slug

red browed finch

blue wren