Celebrating one year 🥂️
For the past months we have been quite silent. The Hubzilla instance we use has gone through quite a journey, from being totally dead, through a resurrection process, thanks to the help of hubzilla's developers, to a pretty stable state currently (hopefully more stable then it was after our previous post). Winter time has also brought quite a struggle and juggling between dayjob, Disroot, house building and family hasn't been easy either.
1st of May marks a year since we have signed papers and became land owners. This is also the moment our dream of building our own home has become a reality. The plan now is to get back to documenting the progress of the construction works as we intended to do in the beginning. First however, we must look at what was missed. We therefore invite you for short and quick fly through the last few months of building.
Building the second floor (rain sucks)
In the last post we wrote we were about to close the ground-floor with OSB plates and start building the upper floor walls. (man.... this is so long ago). September has been extremely wet but because we needed to finish building the upper floor to get ready for building the roof in October, we just had to push through it and live with the idea that getting soaked wet is going to be our reality for a while.
Building the roof
With all the walls up and ready, we have started with the roof. Thanks to the awesome help of our friends who took on the main responsibility of constructing the roof, the works have begun in October.
We have reached the highest point of the building. It was time to put up a flag:
Moving permanently to our caravan
While we switched roles and became the helpers in the roof building process, and delegated that part of construction to people that actually know what they're doing, we could take on yet another project. We decided it was time to leave our previous house and move into the caravan next to our new WIP home permanently. And so, while the roof was getting it's final layer, we finalized our move.
Winter
With winter creeping in, we had to do some preparation work around the caravan if we were to survive it. We started with building an entrance, isolating the space between the ground and the floor of the caravan and prepared electric heaters. In retrospect, little did we know how harsh winter will be for us.:
Isolation
We've spent our December days isolating the house from the outside. The house is built as a defusive open structure, meaning that the construction allows for moisture and humidity to pass through the walls and get out to the outside, but prevents moisture from entering the house. To achieve that we need to use the most dense materials in the interior and as we move to the exterior, less dense materials.
We try to use environmentally friendly materials as much as we can. For wall isolation we have decided to go for wood-fiber isolation. This is a great material to work with as it's light and easy to cut, but also it's bio-degradable and has very good isolating properties. For our house we have decided to fill in the space between studs with 180mm thick wood-fiber "wool". On top of that we use 60mm and 40mm dense wood-fiber plates on the exteriors.
Because the inner isolation (wood-fiber woolly thing) is not water-proof, once we started with a wall, we had to finish it. With just two of us, that meant very long work hours, working in cold wind, sometimes rain and finishing in dark. Our neighbor and our little kido were super helpful
Turning the house black
Having the house isolated, it was time to put the final layer. Although the hard wood-fiber plates are water resistant (to some degree), we need to prevent humidity from entering the walls from outside. For this, we needed to install a special membrane that prevents humidity from entering but allows it to go to the outside. Additionally it make the house water and wind tight. And so, with freezing fingers as it was the beginning of January we've began to cover our house in the darkness.
On the way to remove scaffolding
With the roof finished, isolation in place and the membrane on, it was time to remove the scaffolding. As much as we would like to have windows in place while the scaffolding is still there (especially on upper floor), due to the fact we went for a crazy DIY custom window solution that hasn't been (and still isnt btw) nowhere near to be ready, we decided there is no point in burning money on something we won't be using (weekly price for scaffold rent was crazy). For the final facade we have decided to go for vertical wood planks. Using the fact that we still had easy access around the upper floor, we hurry to mount the construction that will be holding the final facade.
And so, for the first time we could see our house in its final shape.
Fucking cold
While we were celebrating the fact we have accomplished all the work we planned with only a slight delay, proper winter has arrived. Oh boy it was hardcore. For couple of weeks we had no water nor sewer because all the pipes were frozen. Although the entire winter in caravan was quite cold, during this period the temperatures were reaching 0C and below inside in the mornings and heating the place was extremely hard and expensive. We decided to use only one small room and focus on heating that instead of the entire space.
Spring is coming, new place for bunnies
Fortunately for us, the proper winter did not last long and after few weeks, everything started to come back to life. Bunnies have spent most of that harsh time with us inside. Our cat wasn't happy about it at first but he understood the situation and mange to deal with it like a pro. Now that winter was over and the bunnies' place was totally destroyed by the wind and snow, we have decided to build something more sturdy and more permanent. It was a nice moment to finally get outside and start doing things. We've used leftover building material and put together a nice little corner. Tulp and Roos Snoozebol were very happy to play outside again :)
Unfortunately just a couple of weeks later the two managed to dig their way out in the night and we could only find Tulp hiding under our car, when we got up. So until we find her a new friend, Tulp is alone in the new space.
And this brings us to the current state of the house. Probably missed some steps in between but hopefully from now on we will be able to report on the progress in realtime so it will be much easier. We are entering a very busy time in the building process. We have made tons of final decisions during the period we weren't building due to the weather conditions. we ordered bamboo panels for our super DIY window frames we are going to build ourselves, we (almost) decided on a heating system for the house and the type of floor we want to use. We started building inner walls too. Lot's of thing are yet ahead of us, and we are super excited about finishing the house and moving in. We hope to accomplish that before winter hits us again as we do not want to spend another winder in the caravan.
Hope you will hear from us on regular basis now! Thanks for all of you who are cheering us, and see ya on fedi.
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