Peter and Natasha

Written by Natasha, on 28-03-2009

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We were blessed with a beautiful day to get stuck back into building yesterday. After being interstate for work during the week, and with Peter back at paid work in the city, I was hanging out to get out to the land to do some physical work, get back to nature, and get some progress on the build. 

We had some delightful visitors of the feathered kind when we arrived, and the sunrise was beautiful (see photos in gallery). As we were about to embark on our next learning initiative (ie how to build stud walls) I was reminded of a question my sister Katrina asked us on one of her visits to our build. She asked "How do you know what to do?" Fair question really, after all, our knowledge base of building-stuff is pretty similar. 

Well the answer is really simple. We follow instructions (well most of the time) and we learn as we go. We watch Brian's DVD when we take on the next step, and in this case, we read up on how to build our internal stud walls the night before as a refresher.

It would be fair to say that our (especially Peter's) knowledge and confidence has been growing, but most of what we are doing is a first-time experince for us. We take our time doing a 'new thing' right the first time, and after that we develop our own 'system' and become more efficient with practice.

This was definitely the case yesterday. We took our time building the first wall, referring to Brian's book as we went, but got quicker with each one. The most time consuming part is setting up string lines from the beams above where the wall will go, so we can measure the height of the walls (at each end of the wall). Every wall has a different height and the top of the wall always slopes on an angle. None of our rooms will have a flat/horizontal ceiling. Once we measured them we found we were quite efficient at putting the walls together.

We don't have a lot of room on the floor to lay the walls, as our bracing is in the way, so we have laid them on top of eachother where it is practical. At the moment we are trying to figure out how long the rest of the build will take and how we can use forward thinking and planning to make the best of our time, particularly as Peter won't be working on the build during the week for the next 6 weeks. 

Thank you to all our beautiful friends and family for all your support - in particular my mum Brenda, sister Katrina, Aygun, Matt, Ivan and Sue & Ian (Peter's parents).  I am moved to tears when I think about how much support and love we are surrounded by. Thank you so much!  

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