We got a house up… but I wasn’t there to see it! We’re half a week into our first build trip with ten guys working sun up to sundown. Posts in the ground to roof on top took only 4 days!
Me and Rhett are still here, Rhett’s dad Gary is still kicking around and now our coworker Philip fresh back from Germany is joining the party. Two builders/electricians/all round experts have joined us from Sobega and we have 4 Germans – friends of the Hansen’s all the way from around the world for the occasion.
We’d love for this to just be a build trip, but unfortunately we still need to cut more wood, hence week 6 of milling. True to all milling trips our chainsaws are breaking and we’ve broken 2 chain tensioners and 2 oiler gears already.
We’ve concluded that the oil pump in our new chainsaw must be faulty as the gear was only put in a week ago, and even more so we put a new one in today and it lasted an hour! Our conclusion is that the pump must be seizing, which then shears the plastic gear. If that’s the case what we were concluding was a terrible design decision by Stihl could actually be really smart- we broke a £2 gear rather than jamming the engine.
So the milling goes as always. Slowly, with lots of problems in the mud and rain. A house going up is sure exciting, but it’s hard to feel it with the same old seemingly unending task ahead of us.
We have 2 days to get about 70 more pieces of wood cut before the builders want to frame our house; and then we still need wood for the houses to do all the things that aren’t just supporting the roof, and then of course we need to get ready for a third house to go up. Sigh. Eventually we’ll be finished…
In other chainsaw news one of our German team cut his leg with a chainsaw which is absolutely terrifying. Luckily it was only idling and so it just nipped him at a low rpm. It’s God’s mercy to us that we’ve not had any serious injuries so far.
Builders are making good progress though 😃. Despite:
- The only torx screws we could find we’re decking screws, so our whole house is using them
- The instructions (and bolts) for our solar water tanks blew away when the box crumpled during its flight in, so we have no idea how to install them!
- We bought the wrong kind of house wrap. We asked for ‘house wrap’ at the hardware store and took what we were given which is some kind of black bun bag type wrap and not the tough stuff we need.
- Rhett miscalculated how much plywood he needed, and now his loft is short some floor
Other than all that it’s going great 😀 I never expected building a house in the bush to be easy, I guess I just never inferred that of course means that the whole thing is a big bodge job making do with what you have 😆
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