Mansfield Update

Welcome to the update of the Mansfield job.

Regular readers will forgive me, I hope, for not writing the blog last week, but we have had two pretty sick little ones and a lot of travelling to do. Many thanks are due at this point to my endlessly hard-working wife Cathy, without whom this whole venture would be made much harder. The stacking on our current job in Mansfield is complete, and the rendering started on Wednesday.

 

 

 As you can see from the photograph we’ve added, the chippy’s have all the timber work in the walls ready for fixing to for the cabinet-makers. The photo shows the kitchen/dining area – the top of the horizontal length of pine is set at 900mm from the floor, which gives a point to screw to through the back of the cabinets near the top, and the bottom render stop, where normally the skirting boards would fix to, gives a fixing point  for the bottom of the cabinet. This 45mm timber has been placed flat against the surface of the straw, meaning that the front surface of the timber will be exposed for the cabinet-maker to see clearly, but will be hidden once the cabinet carcasses are in place.

To the right of the kitchen window, you can see an upside down ‘T’ of timber, which has been put in place to fix the rangehood and its flue to. Because we don’t know the exact dimensions of the rangehood, we decided to cut a groove into the surface of the straw for the timber to sit inside, and so hide the timber beneath the full 45mm thickness of the render. Steven, the owner, has taken video footage and measurements of all the timber in the walls so that he can refer to it later to find the exact locations for fixing to (especially the pine noggins put in at 2.1 metres for picture hanging which are all through the living areas and bedrooms). These will all have sheets of aviary-mesh wire stapled over them to anchor them firmly into the render, but any that will carry a significant amount of weight have fencing wire looped around them, through the walls and around an offcut of trench mesh. This is then tightened with gripples, which pulls the whole arrangement tight to the straw wall.

As you can probably gather a lot of thought and effort is put into providing adequate fixing points for all the trades who follow us in the building process. It’s kind of inevitable that something will have been forgotten, so we’ll describe fixing to the wall through finished render at a later date.

Until next week,

Hooroo, Mark.

Hi Everyone

Hi to all of you who read Mark’s blog. Just a quick apology on Mark’s behalf that he has not updated the blog over the last two weeks, things have been really hectic and we have had two pretty sick children, but he will be back on deck by the end of this coming weekend.

We hope you have a relaxing, safe long weekend.

Regards, Cathy and Mark

Week One – The New Project

Well folks, the Easter break is over, I’ve run out of chocolate, and we’re back in Mansfield. The Autumn break seems to be here, as there was a dusting of snow on Mt Buller last week, and a brief shower or three with a cool and windy change on Wednesday afternoon. We don’t have a roof on our current project as of Wednesday, so we were a might bit nervous as the change came through. According to the locals, we only got 4mm in total, which was just enough to justify the couple of hours we spent putting black plastic up where the galvanised steel roofing should have been. By Thursday morning, the showers had cleared, and all was well.

Mat Kirley’s gang of chippies have done a fabulous job of the frame, which is probably as simple as a strawbale frame can be, with little or no unnecessary timber to obstruct the stacking process.

As can be seen from the photographs we’ve uploaded, all of the loadbearing uprights are of envelope treated 90×45mm plantation pine; You may care to note that the uprights on either side of the window and door openings are two lengths of 90×45 pine nailed together, placed with their widest side parallel to the wall. Positioning them like this not only gives them maximum strength to resist the the considerable pressure generated by compressing the bales with wire and gripples, but makes fixing them to the 250×45 perimeter beam quite simple. (Unlike the previous job at Barwite, the windows won’t be fitted until after the render is finished, saving a considerable amount of time in masking and cleaning).

As we are stacking the straw walls, the carpenters are finishing off the frame, putting fascia on for the roofing plumber to work to, and fixing render stops inside and out. As can be seen from the second photo below a straight edge and reliable level are used to plumb up from the render stop at the bottom to find the correct position at the top. The bottom render stop not only gives us a nice, straight line to work to, but provides a fixing point for the skirting board. The top render stop provides a straight line for the render to meet, and guarantees that the plaster cornice has a flat surface to fit to, giving a bug, dust and draft proof finish between the lime-rendered walls and the plaster ceiling.

Mat Kirley does seem to have a tendency to over-engineer things a little (never a bad thing), and as you can see from the last photograph, a little noggin has been placed onto the edge of the window frame to prevent distortion under compression, but, in actual fact will prevent the bales compressing properly, as it fouls the end of the bale, and stops it sliding smoothly down the frame. This will be circumvented by levering the ends of the bales past these obstacles as the compression takes place.

These window frames on the inside of the wall are designed and built solely to carry the weight of the straw and render above them, and must be carefully thought out to allow them to accomodate the desired curve or corner at the windows edge.

Stay tuned for the next exciting chapter, in which we’ll talk about some more specific stacking issues. Hooroo, Mark