Lissa from Sustainable Living Tasmania, an organisation based in Hobart that promotes sustainability, invited us down to Hobart to give a talk and run a couple of workshops in recycled puppet making. The weekend was a great success with the Princes Wharf shed full of sustainable products, organisations and the general public drinking it all in.

My talk was entitled Evolution or Revolution, a Sustainable Renovation of a 1950’s Weatherboard house. My good friend John Boxer from Bohemian Arts in Deloraine, is a whizz at powerpoint presentations and he helped me put an interesting one together that did not look at the nuts and bolts of renovation. rather it looked at things such as lateral thinking, compromise, research and more. All illustrated with examples from the website. Here it is. It is an Office2007 pptx version

EVOLUTION OR REVOLUTION

I have been slack!! Very slack!!  I have not updated the site for at least two months and before that only briefly. It certainly is not due to nothing happening. In fact it has been the opposite. Now the days are longer and we can spend more time working on the house. It is also prime performance time for puppet shows so we are adding another skill to our repetoire…..JUGGLING….. juggling work, house, house, dog walks, community work, the house… etc etc etc.

Since an extremely successful Sustainable House Open Day in mid September we have been into Spring madness with Sean’s puppet shows at lots and lots of Agricutural shows and festivals along with a very colourful flag painting project involving 25 primary schools and the hugely popular Tasmanian Craft Fair held in Deloraine every year.

So work excuses aside what have we achieved with the house? Well we got our building permission from Council and so have been spending lots of time tracking down double glazing options for the windows and doors as well as what sort of piers we should use under the building.

In early November we started at the front of the house on the front porch. Have a look at the porch page for all the nitty gritty! We are lucky enough to have found Handy Andy who is an alternative house builder and all round handyman. He built the framing and roof for the porch. The rest of of is up to us.

Andy will come back soon to start work on taking the sunroom off the back of the house and continue on with the extension. We have also found a green plumber. www.greenplumbers.com.au he is based a little way away but I think he will be worth it as he understands all the grey water, water tanks etc that we want to do.

Basically look under The Blurb for all the new stuff on double glazing, the porch, piers and joists and bearers and stuff.

GOOD STUFF!

We have now got our building permit from Council and found a person to help build our extension. Andy is an alternative house builder who thinks like we do.

Andy will start with the porch out the front and then move onto the Dining room. I am now in the process of listing all the materials and getting prices and availablity locally. Its all fun if not fiddly work. At the same time I am trying to get the front of the house finished with the painting. The incessant rain that Tassie has been having has slowed the process down but we are now moving forward if only slowly. It will be good to get the front finished.

The thing was, as is the same in the rest of the house, NO STORAGE! so we would have to build some built-ins either side of the chimney. Eventually the fireplace is going to be taken out and put on the opposite side in the present day dining room.

Living room August 09

 We stripped out all the furniture and piled it all up in the spare bedroom and crammed in the TV, electric heater as it is mid winter. This became our temporary living room.

Then came the job of removing the mantelpiece and rudimentary shelving that had been added at some time.

Doorway filled in

 The doorway into the long hall was filled in and a texture added to the plasterboard to match the textured plaster that goes right around this room.

The ceiling was really grotty with smoke and grime. Sugar soap and a mop took care of that with a couple of coats of white clay paint.

building the built ins 1

  The built ins were next. This took ages as the ceiling, being lath and plaster was subtly uneven and nothing is square. We used masonite as the cladding as we had discovered that Masonite is made from only hardwood sawdust compressed under heat until the natural lignite in the wood creates the substance that holds it all together. No nasty glues!! It is made in Australia by Australia Hardboards and used for all sorts of things such as wall panelling, under vinyl, bracing and pegboard.

I used my trusty thicknesser to dress the tassie oak boards that had been used as the mantlepiece originally and oiled it with the Volvox hard wax oil. Shelves were made from offcuts of pine flooring that we have carried around for ages, we faced these with dresses fence palings.

built ins almost finished

  It seemed to take weeks and weeks but eventually the built-ins were built in, the floors sanded, walls painted, picture rail made from the strips of tassie oak that were around the room plus another layer that were originally in the entrance hall. We moved all the furniture back in all in time for Sustainable House Day in September.

 The finishing touch for now was a mixed wood panel to hang above the fire place. This will allow a flat screen TV to be hung if that is wanted. Power and arial were wired into one of the wardrobes as well as a new power point near the filled in doorway.

The last thing to do is to design and make the doors for the built ins.

Time to move on to the next part of the adventure

WOW !!! What can we say.

At 10.00am on Sunday 13th September we opened our house up for Sustainable House Day. Five other houses in the Meander Valley in Northern Tasmania also opened their doors. All very different in style and with many areas of sustainablity from stand alone solar power to natural paints and finishes, composting toilets and reed beds to various hot water systems and lots more.

We thought that we would see about 50 people in the day. WELL it was approx 200 all armed to the teeth with questions, clipboards and maps. That was repeated in each house. The feedback that we have had has been fantastic and we will be looking to do it again nextyear.

The Sustainable House Day team at SHMECO who ran it this year did a fantastic job of coordinating the 170 houses that opened nationally, not an easy job, so thank you Judy, Pia and Belinda, well done.

So after spending a while cleaning up the house to within an inch of its life and getting lots of little jobs done it is back to the task of renovating in a sustainable fashion. On that front we have just got our builders permit andlined up a great person to assist us in the building of our extension so full steam ahead.

I will update about specific topics at a later time.

When we started this blog and renovation the one thing that kept coming up was what can we use to put on top of our lovely, but cold, Tas oak polished floors. The answer is rugs. The problem was that we could not find good, natural, eco rugs at a price that we could afford.

That was until one weekend in New Norfolk when we were performing Punch and Judy shows at a festival the way forward presented itself. Our neighbouring stall consisted of three very friendly Alpacas and there owner Tracey from Olmec Alpacas. She was selling quilt batting made from her own Alpaca fleece along with coloured rovings ( fleece that has been carded and is ready for spinning). The rovings had been dyed with organic, natural dyes. Mandy bought a kit for needle felting .(No we had not heard of it either!)

A very simple process where by punching the rovings in with a barbed needle they become enmeshed with the fibres of the batting, thus felting together. Very simple to do!! Mandy embellished a felt hat that she already had and got great feedback from people. Then we learnt that you could purchase a thicker batting at a very reasonable price. EUREKA moment, lets make our own rugs, Local produced Alpaca fleece 100%, organic dyed rovings, it all fits the billf or our green renovation. So thats what we decided to do. We ordered a few meters of the thicker quilt batting and more coloured rovings. Whilst waiting for this to arrive as the manufacturer in Victoria was holding things up a little we researched on the internet to see if you could obtain a mechanical means to needle felt as the areas we had to do were fairly large. There were machines by Bernina at around $500 or so. A bit expensive as it was only like a sewing machine but with a group of barbed needles. BUT wait in the good ol’ USA you could buy an attachment for a sewing machine for around $50.00 US from Feltcrafts.com

 It duly arrived and we went to the Deloraine tip shop and bought an old Singer for $5.00 ripped the guts out, made a bigger table for it and Voila! a mechanical needle felter

Mandy using converted sewing machine

Needle adapter on sewing machine

We tried it out on a small piece and it worked beautifully. Now for the large rug. We had designed a motif for the house which we intend to use throughout and we blew  it up and tranferred the design on o the felt. Mandy used a hand needle felter to fix the rovings and then onto the machine. It worked fine but you have to roll up the rug to fit it under the arm. Also the needles tended to break and they are quite expensive at $2.00 each. If you break all six on the adpator that is $12.00 a time.

Back to the drawing board. I was moving a foam mattress inside when it came to me. You use foam under the felt for the needles to go into. You need something that will go up and down mechanically. I had an old jigsaw power tool that still worked but the blade holder was worn out. It had a variable speed control which might help. All I had to do was figure out how to adapt the needle holder to fit onto the jigsaw. Turned out to be so easy, remove the jigsaw blade holder, slip on the needle adapter and tighten the screw. Too easy.

The Jigfelter !!

The front garden progresses. After a futile wait for the various tree loppers in the area to come good with promises of  delivering woodchip mulch a whole 30km’s out of Launceston we finally found a landscape supplier that had a variety of wood mulch products at reasonable prices that would deliver. Not as cheap as the tree loppers but alot bloody quicker!

We settled on pine peelings. These are the bits peeled off pine logs when they are made into perfect round  poles before they are treated with all the nasty chemicals to preserve them. A day later 8 cubic meters turned up and was dumped in a pile down the side of the house.

Right to work. A layer of carpet which we got from the house across the road when they were having a new one fitted, was put down and then a layer of mulch. The carpet stops the grass and also stops the mulch taking nitrogen from the soil. Learnt that one from Peter Cundall on the ABC radio. I had help from the feller across the road who is doing wonders part time in the garden and by the end of the day it was finished. All it needs now is edging which I have to make up and plants. Thr garden is now a low water using, much more open garden watched over by Gabby the Garden Angel who is a media celeb in her own right as people quite often stop and take photos.

Front of house when we bought it.

Front of house in June 09

 

Front of garden now July 09

Tessa dog planting squeaky toys

Emma planting trees

In June our friend Emma came down from Northern NSW to the cold of Tassie to help out for a week. Part of what we wanted to achive was the planting of some native trees and shrubs in a corner of the garden.

The next afternoon we dug holes all over the garden and planted them. A week later I made tree guards from chicken wire taken from the Turkey yard when we demolished that last year. Not much goes to the tip from our place.

Tessa planting trees

Difficult to see but the trees are all surviving and should do well. A couple of years from now and it will start to look great.

tree guards

September 13th 2009  Mandy & I are opening our house up as part of Sustainable House Day. It is on 13th September and five houses in Northern Tasmania are opening up their doors as part of a national day. All sorts of houses are opening to the public to show what sustainablity is in the home. Come along and have a look at five very different homes around the Meander Valley in Northern Tasmania and see what it is all about.

I approached the Sustainable House Day organisers to find out what was required to enter our house. It turned out that Community groups were being encouraged to run local events as part of the day and get paid for each house that was opened. Part of the payment was to go to the householders.

In our area there are quite a number of alternative, sustainable dwellings and soon five came forward to be part of it. The community group is The Friends of Jackeys Marsh who run an event “The Jackeys Marsh Forest Festival“. Next year it is to be a carbon neutral event with a sustainable expo, music, and art walks as part of the activities. What a brilliant combination. Sustainable House Day allow the groups to advertise on their website and organise national media coverage while we do the same at a local level.

Sustainable House Day is a great concept and has been run for a number of years. Come along and be part of 2009.