Plumbing

I met Savva the Plumber on site this morning to rough in the water and gas plumbing to the dwelling. I had originally wanted him to run his pipes around the outside of the frame in the void between the timber and Hebel panels, but he was unable to make it before the Hebel went up and so the pipes are now running over the roof trusses.

This is possibly a good outcome - at least now any future leak will be easy to identify and fix, and the pipes will be insulated by the metric tonne of insulation I'll have in the roof - 2xR2.5 batts, plus R1.6 Anticon blanket under the tin.. so the hot water will stay hot and the cold will stay cold.

We didn't get quite as far with the rough-in as I'd have liked, mainly because I've yet to select a (gas boosted) solar hot water system and so we don't yet know the positions of the plumbing fittings and where they should come through the wall. In addition to that, the gas plumbing didn't happen mainly because I haven't decided where to site the bottles - the best spot is right where a rainwater tank should go, so there needs to be a bit of thought put into that.

At least the majority of the plumbing grunt work is done now, though.

In between supervising the plumbing I busied myself cutting and fitting the Hebel infill panels below the dwelling windows - that is, until I got sick of the noise and the dust.

The tops will wait until I knock up a little frame on which to stand them while they're screwed into place.

After I got sick of cutting the Hebel I spent the rest of the afternoon getting set up to install the rest of the full panels to the dwelling next week. My brother Gareth has decided to fly down from Sydney next weekend again (what a bloody legend!!) to help put up the rest of the Hebel, so I needed to figure out how we'd get the panels installed over the void above the shipping container.

Ultimately (but probably sooner than that in the grand scheme of things) I plan to pour a concrete slab over the shipping container as an outdoor patio area for the dwelling, and as part of that I need to build formwork over and in front of the shipping container. Killing two birds with one stone, I decided to get this done now and use the forms as a working platform for the Hebel installation.

In addition, we need a safe way to gain access to the top of the container. Currently it's possible to jump over the void to the hillside, but I'd not like to try that carrying one end of a 100kg Hebel panel :) So while I had the form ply out I reinforced one sheet with a couple of bearers and it makes a perfect ramp across to the hillside.

So that's about all I got done today. Tomorrow I might attack another more visible job :)