Peter and Natasha

1. Kitchen delight
(Comments)

...ery close now. I checked back on your photos from this time last year - you had rain then too with stump holes full of mud and comments about your ute being stuck in the mud. What a change since those...

2. Tradie's
(Comments)

...lose don't lose the lesson, you have got the lesson Peter maybe yor have to ask tradie to go around the holes or he may end up in it.Re Horsham and flooring it turned out not suitable for salvage but...

3. The longest time
(Blog/Living and Finishing)

... would rather. As I sit here writing this, Peter and Dylan are outside in the beautiful sunshine digging holes to plant more fruit trees. We have a fabulous combo of horse manure, sheep manure, compos...

4. Moving along
(Blog/Living and Finishing)

...also been able to use our bargain second hand wardbrobe doors. Beautiful! I have also been digging holes in preparation for planting some bare-rooted fruit trees, and we are very excited about e...

5. No Experience Necessary
(Straw Bale House/Straw Bale House)

...g, digging, cleaning out and re-digging, and re-digging and cleaning out, and then filling in, our stump holes. If you are a bit of a softie when it comes to hardship, adversity, or things not going y...

6. Pantry order at last
(Blog/Living and Finishing)

...rom rendering so Steven and I embarked on getting the square peg known as the shelving through the round holes that are our doors and into our pantry. I find it hard to know if these things are going ...

7. Rendering Bliss
(Blog/Living and Finishing)

...ckets and apply it to the wall with a trowel. Then we go over it again with the trowel to smooth out any holes and rough bits, and lastly we sponge the walls in a circular motion once or twice to give...

8. An excellent Sunday
(Blog/Walls and Render)

... him to do that task without a worry. Meanwhile, Logan and I took to digging what must be the last stump holes we'll have to do on this house. One was a replacement for a veranda post which was too sh...

9. Revealing Walls
(Blog/Walls and Render)

...as that we would go with the higher end of what we both wanted. I like the more rough look, with little holes and dents, whereas Peter prefers a more finished look. No problem for me, and it was res...

10. Another big dose of generosity
(Blog/Walls and Render)

...e had fantastic loads of cob being mixed up (by Hans the master) and swarms of people filling up all our holes and gaps with the render. We experimented a bit with the render mix, and ended up getting...

11. Specifications of the house
(Straw Bale House/Straw Bale House)

... - Treated Cypress Pine (termites don't like it) * No of stumps - 104 plus 13 verandah posts * Stump holes - 400mm diameter * Depth of stump holes - 1000mm * Depth of concrete pads in holes - ...

12. Inspection time
(Blog/Rafters and Roofing)

...ace. We had our framing inspection today. The last inspection we had was for a moonscape called stump holes, some time last year. So this inspection was to check everything we've done since then an...

13. Veranda scenario
(Blog/Posts, beams, framing)

...t that fact slip from my mind as I was happily (or haplessly) putting in posts, filling in the remaining holes, celebrating getting them finally out of my hair and putting up the beams. So with a nagg...

14. Last good hole filled in
(Blog/Posts, beams, framing)

...the day was to get all of the posts finished before Ivan left and that's what we did. So no more digging holes. Well not that I can think of anyway. That's a reason to celebrate. Woohoo! The next miss...

15. Framing finished
(Blog/Posts, beams, framing)

...e floating in the breeze! So the timber is ordered and when that arrives we'll be back into cleaning out holes, compacting the holes back in around the posts, fitting bearers and also beams. It's all ...

16. By-pass
(Blog/Posts, beams, framing)

...e relatively slow and have made mistakes that needed to be fixed, which takes time, b) rock in our stump holes put us back by about 2 1/2 months and c) all the angles of the house has made things quit...

17. Assume nothing
(Blog/Posts, beams, framing)

...ry instruction given and that was to avoid putting the trench through any of our painstakingly made post holes. Guess what?   With 2.3 metres to play with, the trench went almost right through th...

18. Beaming
(Blog/Posts, beams, framing)

...ng them across the block behind the ute again. So then it was time for a timewarp, back to digging stump holes. OK, they were actually veranda post holes. Same job. But easier because we've already go...

19. Last 6 stumps in
(Blog/Stumps and Bearers)

...although we saved the perplexing ones until last in the name of progress.  As we packed all of our holes down with earth and didn't really mark them (couldn't really settle on a good technique ...

20. Dingo Maestro Stu
(Blog/Stumps and Bearers)

...sisted us in moving around 20 cubic metres of clean fill (in 150mm lots) into our trenches and massive holes, whilst Peter took on the temperamental ‘whackers’ otherwise known as tamper...

21. Clean Fill - yeah right
(Blog/Stumps and Bearers)

... “clean fill” but it’s a bit of a joke.  The earth we’ve pulled out of the holes and trenches is very rocky and we can’t use it to refill the holes.  So we&rs...

22. Trail blazers or crazy, hmm, not sure!
(Blog/Stumps and Bearers)

...is something. We have been working all weekend to get more stumps in - and we are now up to the single holes that have been excavated. They are pretty big. it takes 20 shovel-loads of dirt to fill ...

23. Concreting underway
(Blog/Stumps and Bearers)

The much anticipated day of concreting our holes and trenches arrived yesterday.  We were still marking out positions and taking down string lines when the concreting guys turned up.  Ha

24. Rain has arrived
(Blog/Stumps and Bearers)

...in far North Queensland, and has heaps of experience. Tomorrow we get our concrete poured in our stump holes and trenches. Exciting stuff, but a fair bit of pressure for us to get the depth of conc...

25. The Bath - a great invention
(Blog/Stumps and Bearers)

...vely for tired sore bodies like ours! We've spent this weekend working on cleaning out trenches (stump holes) and enjoying the sunshine. It's been a less frenetic pace, and we have a little ghetto-...

26. Rocks and stump holes
(Blog/Stumps and Bearers)

It has been such a testing few weeks since we started these stump holes. Weeks of serious, unexpected hard yakka to get our stump holes complete. Amazing basalt rock in our earth, we have even found