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Progress
When the weather’s good the Terra Firma team can complete two sections of rammed earth wall each day – we’ve about thirty in total so lots to do.
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First wall has been rammed
Wednesday 11th July — significant date in our building story. Paul and the team at http://www.earthhomes.co.nz/ rammed the first wall.
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Here we go!
Friday 18th was ground-breaking day – excavations have started and it’s all on. Glad I’m not the one project managing all of this, the fact there are no utilities adds all sorts of additional elements.
Visiting the site today the biggest change is how much ‘bigger’ the building platform is now the area has been flattened.
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I’m a super-city convert!
Feels odd complimenting your local government body, but credit where it’s due. Am really impressed the Auckland City Council handled our building consent application diligently but fairly. Quite a long list of questions following the application, but once the necessary answers and back up info provided, the approval went through in very good time.
Thanks to the lovely folk at Kiwi Bank we also now have the finance in place.
All we need now is for the weather gods to co-operate. Friday perhaps?
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Tagged Auckland City Council, building consent, eco-build, environment
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New year and we’re progressing
Seems like planning to build takes even longer than actually building (possibly because we haven’t experienced the latter yet).
And when you decide not to buy off plan and using so-called mainstream building methods, I guess you should expect things to take a while.
Paul Gereats, from Terra Firma who has designed and will be building our new home has been hard at work.
To see some of his work, and get a sense of the type of home we’ll be living in, check out http://www.earthhomes.co.nz/
He’s found a suitable source of just the right kind of earth near Mangawhai and numerous tests far too technical for me to get my head around, have shown that a wall rammed with this material will be super-strong and long lasting. Those ancient Greeks new a few things about building, it seems (and let’s not forget the addition of a small % of good ol’ 20th century concrete!).
Geotechs have done their thing, excavations have been planned and waste water systems designed… so now its on to boring stuff like financing and contracts and (gulp) consents.
Can’t wait to see how the new SuperCity planners respond to our eco-friendly but so-not-the-norm proposal.
Will be interesting to see how much the ethos of sustainability is actually ingrained into the Auckland Council – their Sustainability Plan (http://www.aucklandcity.govt.nz/council/documents/bright/docs/final.pdf) includes four goals, one of which is “Making it easier for Aucklanders to make sustainable choices”.
So in principle, we’ll be sweet …
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Tagged earthhomes, sustainability plan, sustainable choices, waste water systems
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Our cloud and and it’s rammed earth lining
Building your own home lesson #1 is don’t assume the architect will design something in your budget.
Everyone tells you that, which is why you go to great lengths to impress on your architect that you have a limited budget and constantly double-check the ideas are feasible…
… when two builders decline to quote and another one’s quote is 80% more than your budget it’s probably time to move on.
So we did.
Best thing about the whole rather expensive lesson is that we realised one of the original ideas was actually worth looking into more closely (we’d moved away from it thinking costs would be prohibitive).
Delighted that we’re now well down the track working with Paul at Terra Firma and hope to have a home made of rammed earth.
This is the real-deal as far as being an eco-buliding method and Paul’s certainly got the credentials and the passion.
So we’re on our way, with a new design and a home that will be quite different in feel and build from the first idea – but still have the simple lines and open plan elements we like so much.
Rammed Earth house plan
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Musings on being a pragmatic activist 