30 May - 2 Jun 2013

4 day stint

We treated ourselves this week to 4 full days at the earthship. A friend looked after our animals, so they were happy, and we had a great time working our buns off! Bit pooped now, but look what we got done...

Woodworks

Dave spent most of the 4 days with his carpenters hat on. He made a couple of frames for the stained glass panels going in either side of the front doors. These were made out of an old door frame I picked up somewhere or other, probably by the roadside. Although pine, it's old, slow grown pine, so nice and solid.

Then after helping me fit these, he started on the skylight hoppers. It was so long ago that he made the boxes in the roof to take them that it took a bit of time getting back into it. But by the end of Saturday he'd done both of the main roof ones and started working out how to do the triangular one for the dome.

Wooden window frames for stained glass panels

Roof skylight hoppers

Bottles and cans and fidobe

And I spent most of my time building up the fidobe can and bottle brick walls for the bathroom (left back of 2nd pic), utility room (right back of 2nd pic) and front entrance.

By Sunday we were both fairly tired, I'd run out of shredded paper for the fidobe and reached a level on the bathroom wall where plumbing needs to be sorted. So we had a clear out. This is the first time it's been this empty in years!

I then started to mark out the kitchen which, of course, involved me changing my mind at least 10 times an hour. I do have a plan (have had it for years) but in actuality tweaks needed to be made. The kitchen will be on the right of the pic and the living room area on the left. I've collected a selection of sinks, doors, sideboards and ideas that make this by far the most interesting bit of the whole build for me.

Btw, the wood column in the pic below is properly vertical, it's just my bad photography that makes it look wonky.

Fidobe can and bottle brick walls

bathroom and utility room walls at back of pic

Stained glass panels This is one of the two stained glass panels I mentioned earlier. Kindly donated by Pete and Maggie, the colours work beautifully with the bottle bricks I've been making. I think they'll look fab in the front entrance, making a nice welcome to the 'ship. I'm absolutely chuffed to bits with them.

A sleek visitor

This beautiful ladder snake made an entrance down the back wall and into the bathroom on Sunday morning, we think it's home may be in the tyres somewhere. Then it vanished making me very careful where I put my fingers, even though it was more scared of me than I of it. Luckily it showed up again later in the morning so we enticed it into a bucket and released it outside under the wood pile.

We also have a toad and lots of lizards that live in the tyres (not to mention all the dancing spiders and beetles) so finishing the tyre walls is going to be a very, very careful job - we'd hate to trap in any of the little critters.

Ladder snake with can wall