Well yesterday's construction adventure was educational, with the most obvious lesson today being that two years of being deskbound followed by a year and a half of being a student means I am no longer as young or as fit as I used to be. My old work pants don't fit quite as well either.
We have added another layer of challenge to our project, attempting to use an absolute minimum of new materials, scrounging whatever we can while still producing a structurally sound and hopefully attractive result. We figure this is both environmentally better, minimising the embodied energy of our short-term project, as well as an investigation into the pitfalls of using recycled materials. It also helps the budget when you're an impoverished student..
George hit the Tip Shop and scored some nice bits of wood and sheets of roofing, also providing some bricks from a stash at home. Matt sourced a 2nd hand window, but it proved too big for our purposes in the end. We raided the back of the Enviro Shop for some pallets and other waste materials. (even better, they were used for shipping solar grid connect inverters and as most shipping companies actually refuse to take back pallets these days, they were destined for disposal soon) While these materials are perhaps more suited for building a shanty town in a dystopian future, using actual structural grade recycled materials can only be easier than this....
We started with trimming up some offcuts of aluminium solar panel mounting rails to make a resonable simulation of a window frame. I finally achieved a long-held desire of having a legitimate excuse for buying a wrecking bar and we proceeded to dismantle the pallets and recover the wood and nails. Our fears proved correct, none of the timbers were straight or consistent in any dimension and the hardness grades of wood varied from balsa to ironbark within the one pallet. There were also at least two different sizes of brick, with one type being around 10mm shorter than a standard brick. We decided not to use mortar for this project, again reducing embodied energy and making it easy for cleanup and recycling afterwards. The wall is small enough to be stable and structurally sound without mortar.
Our frame design is waaay overengineered for a wall of this scale, but we decided to do it properly and put in all of the usual studs, noggings, lintel etc as a learning experience. An unexpected realisation is that because the internal wall is provided by the bricks you can get away with a lot of warping in the wall framing as there is no flat surface required for plaster fixing, especially if you are using a flexible outer skin that can handle a bit of 'character' such as radial sawn weatherboards or a vertical ship-lap style timber cladding in our case. This means you can use timber that would otherwise not be considered suitable for framing, meaning more efficient use of resources and hopefully some cost savings.
So far it has all been hand tools and the only new materials used have been two nails (a particularly hard piece of wood meets bent nails = more bent nails) and the tinfoil. We didn't even use any artificial lighting until the last half hour or so. The wall frame and cladding is sorted, roof structure is cut and ready, next time we install and detail the window and assemble the structure then move onto testing. George will be posting the photos soon..
Glenn
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