So about 4 months after the house was ready for them, the brickies finally finished their part of the build. They came randomly for about a month doing a little bit here and there, using rainwater collected from the shed roof into an ex-honey containing IBC (hopefully the mortar won’t attract ants!) and our petrol generator. It’s really starting to look like a house now. The steel cladding is supposed to come in a couple of weeks, so hopefully we’ll be at lock up by early October, only three or four months late.
They sort of smeared the bricks as agreed, but it’s very uneven – not randomly uneven, just some brickies not doing it, while others did it a lot. So some walls or sections are very clean, while others are smeared. We’ve loads of sand (both white and yellow) left over and we’ve got the mix proportions so we’ll buy some cement and mix some up and have a go at adding a smear on the cleaner sections ourselves. Amusingly, the builders are very keen to clean it all off – they’re afraid we’ll change our minds and it will be much more difficult to clean once the steel cladding is on. Unfortunately the differences don’t show up on the photo.
We’ve also got a couple of pallets of bricks left – a built in BBQ for the back porch… And Mark wants to build a mini replica of the house using left over bricks, wood and steel for a kennel for the dogs! Tasks for when we move in. We’ve become great scavengers!
Off Grid Living - Building the Dream 