removing a post...

Was up in Queensland visiting friend a couple of weeks ago and I came across this house for sale on the same road that my friends live on!

 

 It was for sale but I didn't get to have a look inside.

They're spreading like wildfire. I'm in danger of being in a trend!

I've also been away at Paul's for another week and then the second day back from his place, while cutting out steel panels some grinding grit managed to get past my safety goggles and into one of my eyes.

I always work with double filter mask, wrap around eye goggles, ear covers and a beanie as grinder sparks can really sting the scalp!

Got it out, but it led to an eye infection which lasted 10 days! Extremely annoying and made me very irritable!

So I have really only just managed to get back into it.

My early morning arrival is often greeted thus:

They are usually quite put out that I want access to my own land!! But I never tire of seeing them hopping across the paddocks - sometimes in large numbers.

My most recent task was taking out that double corner post that would sit right in the middle of the future kitchen island bench

One of the corner posts came out relatively easily. It was a single piece steel shaped structure.

The second was a stubborn M%$#&!**%!! - F$$!!&@*^!

 

 

I used 20 disks to get it out. They kept getting jammed in the cuts and snapping off the central core. It is made from 6mm steel and not 4 like the walls panels.

But finally after about 4 hours straight it fell - and was so heavy the entire container rang like a giant bell!!

You can see in the photo there is a double 'U' shaped beam in the section, one inside the other, which caused all the trouble. (The first corner was not constructed this way.) It is too heavy for me to move outside by myself.

But at least I am getting a sense of the space that is beginning to open up.

(the blue supports are temporary until the cross beam goes in.)

I can now go back to cutting out more wall panels - which are relatively easy compared to the previous task.

I have spent so much time up on the ladder plank:

It has begun to feel like:

more budget cuts

Well the engineering issue is resolved. I need to put in two x 7M steel girders and one of 5M.

These are to span the lounge/dining room space and the kitchen so I can remove that corner upright in the picture in the previous post that runs down through the kitchen island.

These beams and the upright supports are arriving next week.

It also means I have to remove the 100mm curtain walling that I left in when removing the walls as the girders need to sit flush with the top rail.

I've also cut through to the last container. So now all are accessible to each other.

Cutting the steel wall panels out is slow and dirty work! Especially when cutting high up over my head. Arms tire quite quickly. And I'm chewing through the cutting disks! But they are cheap, much cheaper than going down the plasma cutter route that I originally planned to do.

I've also used a couple of the panels to make my compost bays. Last week the sun came out, wind disappeared and it was a beautiful warm and sunny late Autumn day.

And I've finished burying the septic. Just needs a little more topsoil so grass can cover most of the lid.

And a couple more photoshop pix of how it will hopefully look like when finished.

Front of house:

Kitchen/Bathroom/Guest room end:

And a bit of fun for those who'd know!

autumn hews

Still waiting to hear from my engineers so I cut out a couple of other small wall sections and had a play with Photoshop to help visualise the end product.

The central column below will eventually be removed:

Looking towards kitchen and bathroom entry:(click to enlarge)

Paul also finished turning the soil in the garden and then went off and collected two big bags of cow poo to help condition the soil and has already planted garlic ready for Spring. He's donating about 6 rhubarb plants to me which will be planted in a couple of months.

All the wet weather recently has also slowed things a little, but at least the place will be green again in a week or so!

on the fence

Back to the garden fence today. It measures 12m X 5m - so 60 sqm of space. That's 2/3 the size of my current 2 B/R flat!!

First the second layer of hinge joint fencing wire:

Then the chicken wire:

All finished - ready to start preparing the soil so planting can begin in early spring (September).
Also I want to make three compost bays using some of the steel panels cut out of the container walls.

I wish I had discovered this gadget a couple of days ago - a netting clip tool:
 

It made attaching the chicken wire so easy. The last couple of days I have been cutting and twisting short lengths of binding wire with pliers and my hands are a mess!

The only issue with these little clips is getting them out of the bag individually:

Sort of reminds me of:

poor support

And so ...yet another hold up because of problems with my engineering plans.

This is the third set of problems since they were issued to me.

Perhaps I am at fault in part for not having checked them thoroughly enough when I first received them, but when you pay someone $4,000 to do a job you sort of expect them to do it right the first time.

This new issue concerns the steel support posts inside the house which help ease the stress from removed walls.

The engineer plans specify attaching plates from the support posts to the parallel flange channel (PFC) that runs along the top of the container.

Unfortunately a container doesn't have an upper PFC. They are only along the bottom of the container.

It takes 5 minutes to Google shipping container construction to find that out.

So now I am waiting for them to answer my email requesting an updated set of plans that address the problem.

In the meantime I have started to establish the veggy garden. On Paul's last visit he chose the position due to the quality of the topsoil he found. It was under where the containers had been sitting before they were moved onto the piers.

He immediately began turning the soil.

Over the last couple of days I have begun erecting the fence to keep out the 'roos and wascally wabbits.

So far I have one round of fencing wire attached. Next I will add another layer above the first to make it around 1.6M high. I also need to run a layer of 600mm chicken wire around the base, with 200mm buried below the ground so rabbits don't dig their way in.
  

The fence wire and star pickets came from an old paddock fence I dismantled last year, and the gate is a cut down back door screen that Paul was going to throw out. It will probably get a lick of paint at some stage.

It is rather a large veggy garden and will allow me to support a small Andalucian village with fresh produce.

But if it exceeds my needs then in the future I can cordon off some of it for native seed raising beds.

I have also taken out a little bit more of the walling to open up three of the four containers to each other.

It's great to see the space beginning to emerge from the dark and narrow tunnels that were originally there.

a sudden breakthrough

While it is hardly a case of this:

I just couldn't wait - so today I got onto the angle-grinder and spent a few hours cutting into the walls to open up between two of the containers.

This one is between the perpendicular container and the end of the three that are side by side.
It will eventually be a much larger gap and is in the corner of the open kitchen-dining area.

I can't cut out too many walls just yet until the steel supports are put in. But a couple of small doorways won't hurt.

perfect positioning

Latest progress - the containers are finally on their piers and the house has a shape!!

Seems to have taken forever to get to this point. I'd been ready to move them since after New Year - but I realised I had to have underfloor insulation of R1.3 for my Basix requirement. Then I thought it was going to be difficult to put it in once the containers were in place as I only have crawl room of around 3-400mm. So I devised a system of putting it down first.This involved fencing wire criss-crossing the piers like a spider's web:

I left this wire in place for almost three weeks to check it would last the distance.Then I covered this with a knitted nylon netting (usually used to keep birds off fruit trees):

(Yes - it does look like a giant trampoline!)

I then left this in place for a week to make sure it stayed in place. Then yesterday I covered the mesh and wires with insulation batts and then tied them down with 0.8mm (25kg) fishing line to make sure they didn't go anywhere overnight. I found these R3.5 certified batts online for $33 per 9sqm - around half the standard store bought price.So I thought you can't have too much insulation and it was such a good price.

                                                    

 

Paul helping tie down batts:

(The bare patch on the right was left free of batts so the first three container ends could be accessed whilst lowering them onto the piers. As soon as the third was in position, and while the crane operators were hooking up the 4th, I unfurled the netting, cable tied it in position, and threw on the batts ready for the last container.)

This morning the Franna crane arrived - I expected it to be bigger, but it did a surprisingly easy job of moving the containers around. It was all done in about two hours.At $231 per hour (including GST) and 1 hour traveling time - I was really pleased with the cost. I had heard of $3,000 -$4,000 figures bandied about for cranes for containers.

 

All done and ready for the next stage!