Spur Wing Shed House

The steel structure almost complete. Should be done next week ready for the next step, the roof. The Solar Panels have been installed (about 6 kw), along with batteries, inverters, controllers etc. I am totally off-grid. The system will need expanding once I move in, but it is more than enough for my needs to power the shed.

At long last the shed is complete! This will help unclutter my life by moving stuff out of my little house and shed in town. I'll spend many days sifting, sorting and storing stuff. V Happy!

After six months of groundwork and preparation, the house shape emerges in just one day. The photos do not do the size justice. My first impressions as I drove up the street this afternoon was quite startling. For in introvert like me, the house is quite the opposite. Fortunately the few remaining gums in front soften the view. It is as tall as my Signal Box house in Armidale, but over twice the width and twice the length. My architects and I put a lot of thought in getting the proportions right. Not too big to be unaffordable, and not too small to appear too boxy. Four of the telescope mounts in the observatory were finished as well. The fourth wall of the shed also completed today. Just the roof, doors and trim to go. And I had to take the drone for a spin on such a day...

It's all happening today. The fabricators have started erecting the portal house frame. The shed builders are covering the last wall. The concretors are forming up the upper path and observatory plinths. Glover is beavering away at the middle path with the little excavator. Even the guys from the council sewer department are at the bottom of the block working on the new sewer connection into the mains. Here is the first columns of the house... And the caps for the telescope mounts... And the progress on the shed... And the paths. The top one is being formed for a concrete pour next week. The middle one has been worked thoroughly to achieve the ideal slope and gradient. The paths were going to be goat tracks but they have morphed into generously proportioned paths. Not only will they give me and visitors easy access to the hanging gardens, but they will catch and divert surface stormwater away from the buildings.

The shed is finally being erected. At least the frame went up over the last two days, but work has now halted. They cannot get their scissor lift into the section behind the shed in order to put up the rear wall sheeting, without running over the water mains pipe. So I am not sure how it will be resolved at this stage. Apparently they were going start putting up the steel for the house proper today, but - would you believe - they could not bolt the apex rafters together! There is not enough room inside the apex for a long enough bolt to be thread through. Hard to explain, but the designers overlooked this critical small detail. The fabricator has had to take the offending sections back to the workshop and weld the rafters together at the apex. The plus side is that the building will be even stronger. I went to the solar guy's workshop, and my off-grid system has been tested and ready to go! I just need a shed to put the solar panels on, and the system and batteries insi...

Two significant milestones today. Firstly the gutter-cum-footpath above the wall has finally been poured which is the last critical piece in place to allow the wall to do its job in protecting the site from erosion. Secondly, two of five or six truckloads of fabricated steel arrived. Erection was planned for next week, but with the rain forecast, it will likely commence the week after next and take two or three weeks.

Well, after all of the headache of building the retaining wall over the last two months we are all set to add the final piece of the puzzle which is to concrete the capping gutter. Everything is in place, but just my luck, not one of the seven concrete pumps in this town is available. Apparently one is on the blink, but the other six are all booked to Baiada to do a massive expansion of their facility for terminating chooks. It is very frustrating because we need to do this before the shed and house frames are erected, which is booked for the week after next. Making the most of the situation, we have hired a small excavator to tidy up and level the pathways above the house. They were originally cut with the big excavator reaching up, but that created just a 1m wide rough cut. The small excavator has made them twice as wide. They too will be concreted, and so perhaps when we do get a pump, both the gutter, which is itself a path, as well as the upper paths can be poured.