Significant Progress

Bathroom external wall rendered

Rain chain and more finished walls

Having a renderer that has been able to give some full time attention to the house has led to significant progress being made over the last few weeks. The internal walls are finished and there are only three external walls, three upper walls and a small section around the front door to go.

Freshly rendered back wall

Front of house freshly rendered

The hemp lime rendering  has not been easy. The window headers have been particularly difficult as the render is not very sticky and so tends to fall off the window headers, the render also does not spread very well and so cannot be moved around on the wall, it also tends to get rougher if you go back and try to touch it up.  But Brett, the renderer, persevered and has managed to do the window headers by filling any gaps or holes first (particularly any patches where chunks of the hemp wall have broken away or crumbled), then when this is dry he has attached a straight edge to the window and finished the underside of the window header, then when this has gone off a bit he has gone back and done around the face of the window header. The window headers have been done the day before the wall has been rendered. Then when the wall is done the sides of the windows or doors have been done first followed by the face of the wall. 

Patching the worst of the holes in the window header

Window header rendered

 The walls were wetted down before being rendered, then sprayed with a light mist of water on the evening after the wall was done on warmer days or the next day, to slow the drying down.

The hemp render was not suitable for use on the Magnesium Oxide (MgO) board at all. It had to be done in two coats, increasing the cost. The MgO wall could not be wet down first otherwise the render just slid off. Even then the render had great trouble sticking to the wall and if done too thickly would bubble and fall off or crack and just slide. The last MgO walls were done by splattering the first coat on which seemed to work better, but it was a bit late in the project to worth this out.  The second coat of render on the MgO was very difficult to work and on most walls the finish was very patchy both in texture and colour.

Left - Hemp render on MgO Board and right- hemp wall

Hemp render on MgO Board

With only a few walls left to do the render will be finished in a few weeks after Brett takes a break from the hemp walls, with a few more conventional jobs. The completion of the internal walls and the external walls, that have lights on them (thank you Brett for doing those walls at short notice), meant that the electrics in the house could be finished. Paul and Luke from Solar Connections came down and fitted all the internal and external wall lights and got all the power points working. A small problem arose when the back circuit and stove circuit would not work. I panicked that there may be a problem with the wiring in the wall or roof and I would have to start pulling the ceiling down to find it. Thankfully this was not required, but a mix up of the stove and dishwasher power points will hopefully be resolved by long cords on these appliances or a short extension cord hidden under the cupboards.

External light installed

Front of house with external lights installed

 I had forgotten about the LED lights under the overhead kitchen cupboards and so spent much of the day putting up the cupboards so the electricians could install the lights. The LED lights were made up to fit the length of the cupboards, leaving a gap for the range hood over the stove.  

Kitchen cupboards and LED lights underneath

Everything happened at once as on the same day the electrics went in, Brett was rendering the external walls and Greg from Alpine Glass put the semi frame less shower screen in the front bathroom. Plus he helped me out by drilling the holes in the tiles for my toilet roll holder, I had been scared to do these for fear of cracking the tiles. With the right drill bit and experience it was no problem.

Semi frame less shower screen

Toilet roll holder

The completion of the internal rendering meant that the final finish on the floor could be done. Before this could be done I had to remove all the boards and plastic protecting the floor and remove the tape and clean the excess render from around the edges of the walls. I used vinegar and hard work to clean up the render from the edge of the floors and had to vacuum and mop the floor several times with multiple changes of water to get rid of all the fine dust. 

Floor in need of more mopping

Cleaned concrete floor

 The first coat of finish on the polished concrete had what looked like crazy paving type pattern cracked in the top of it. This was only visible when light hit the floor at an angle but was much more obvious under artificial light. There were also a few patches of white spots and some rough sections where things had fallen on the floor when the first coat was drying as this was done before the windows had been put in.  

Crazy paving cracks in sealer

White dots on concrete

Henry and Adrian from Dayman Group returned to fix up the floor. It had been two years since they did the first cut on the polished concrete and almost a year since the first sealer went on. The floor was given a light sand which will hopefully resolve the crazy paving cracking and remove the rough sections. A bit more of a sand was required to get out the white spots, which I was told were caused by the floor being covered before the first lot of sealer had fully dried. They also fixed up some patches which would have been covered by the kitchen cupboards, except that the cupboards we are installing are about 30cm off the ground. 

I left while the final coat of floor sealer was still wet and so am keen to get back down there and see what the final finish is like.

Windows Installed

A mini tornado lashed parts of the south coast the previous weekend and upon our arrival at Culburra we were greeted with a big Eucalypt branch on our back gate and garage.

Fallen branch

We had arranged for our windows to be delivered Friday, with an estimated time for arrival of 1.30pm. It was raining Friday morning and a 7am call from Rylock gave us the opportunity to cancel the window delivery. I took a gamble that the rain would stop and had the windows delivered.

We spent the morning covering up the polished concrete floor. While we had been away from the site, Henry and Adrian from the Dayman Group came in and gave the concrete floor a further grind and applied a water based acrylic finish. The finish was more reflective than we expected, so it is a good thing we only chose the satin finish. We did not want to damage the finished floor and so covered it with black plastic and some sheets of OSB to protect it while we did the internal linings and rendering.

Polished concrete floor

Close up of the aggregate in the floor

I was expecting a call advising that the windows were leaving Sydney as I had arranged for Rodney, my window installer to be on site at 1.30pm to unload the windows. I had to delay them about 1 hour after I called up Rylock at 11.45 to see where the windows were only to find out they were to leave Sydney in about 1/2 an hour. Then with news that the truck left Sydney at 1pm. I arranged for Rodney to be on site at 3.30pm, as the trip from Sydney is about 2 1/2 hours. Rodney arrived on time, but no windows. We waited, made phone calls and waited some more and at 5.15pm the windows turned up. Rodney, Joe and Tom worked until 6.15pm on Friday night unloading the windows. The window installers plan to start installing the windows on Friday afternoon was not to be.

Unloading the windows

Sliding door stacked in the house ready for installation

Rod and Joe started early Saturday morning and by late on Saturday all the windows and sliding doors were in. The integral hardwood timber reveal in the Rylock windows made it easy to install the windows in the hemp walls, as they could be screwed to the timber frame in the centre of the walls through the reveal. The installers used plastic shims in different millimetre thicknesses to level the windows. The doors were a little trickier as they were set down in the concrete which was not always perfectly level. The doors ended up having the tracks a few millimetres above the concrete, but this will work out well as it is not big enough to trip over but enough to stop the dust and dirt falling straight into the sliding door tracks.

Sliding doors fill the big empty holes

Windows make the building look more like a house

The windows are a mid grey colour called Windspray, however in the photos the windows still have protective black tape on them from the factory. The windows have about a 20mm gap all around, which was required to be left to install them. We will probably fill this before we finish the walls with 10mm of lime render. The window installers recommended creating a small groove between the render and the windows and filling with Sikaflex to prevent cracking at the joint as the Aluminium windows will expand and contract with changes in temperature.  They also recommended filling the small gap on the inside between the polished concrete slab and the sliding doors with black silicone sealant so that it does not show up against the floor.

Upper windows match sliding doors

Diagonal windows in hallway

Double horizontal windows in the bathroom

While the windows were being installed we started on the ceiling. The ceiling will be made of plywood with the joints between the sheets expressed with a 9mm shadow line. The long end of the sheets goes across the joists and the joints are all on the joists, but in the opposite direction I had to add timber noggin behind each of the joints. I offset the joints and painted the timber behind them black using Resent VOC free paint. This gave a nice matt black finish. We then started installing the sheep's wool insulation.

Rafters and noggins behind joints painted black

Insulation being installed

 

Concrete Polishing

It was a glorious site to see the finished slab stripped of all its formwork. It looks quite thick but the depth is due to the Styrofoam waffle pods in the slab. For the first time we really got a chance to walk around the house and feel how the layout would work and watch as the sun shone through our, for now imaginary, windows. The room sizes felt fine and I was pleased with how well Ken's earlier suggestion to tilt the front pavilion worked.

The finished concrete slab

The concrete polishers, Henry and Adrian from the Dayman Group, arrived with their grinding machine to take off the top layer of the concrete to expose a little of the aggregate. The machine was not as loud or aggressive as I had thought and it operated wet so there was no dust. Instead there was a sloppy muddy slurry that was squeegeed off the edge, so that the machine operator could see how much they were grinding. It was slow methodical work.

Adrian and Henry grinding the slab

When Adrian and Henry first started they did under the kitchen cupboards and we had to look to confirm the level of grind we wanted. The look we chose was a little more than just the fines showing with only a little of the aggregate showing. After the front pavilion was done we did another check just to confirm the look we wanted.

In Nowra we only has the choice of river stone or blue metal aggregate. We definitely did not want the blue metal look, so the river stone was our only choice. We are happy with the river stone's random colours from whites, to tan, to olive, and this looks great with the darker grey oxide we put in the concrete.

Concrete is tricky to photograph

This afternoon after confirming some drainage locations with our plumber, we left Henry and Adrian to finish the grinding. Once finished the concrete polishers will put a temporary coating on the slab, before returning after the walls are done for the final grind and seal. We headed up to Truss-T-Frame Timbers to finalise the frame order and discuss a few of the unusual details of the design. We got there 5 minutes before they closed (oops) and David kindly stayed back to discuss the frame with me.

Ideally we would have ordered the frame two or three weeks ago, so it was ready to go up once the concrete polishers were finished, but time has been taken trying to finalise the awning detail, and it is time well taken as changes to the awning affected the stud spacing. Thankfully the frame will only take a couple of weeks, and this will give me time to organise someone to put it up.