Feb 19, 2014: end in sight for the construction phase.

Today my brother George was busy putting up more plywood on the interior walls and I spent most of the day researching water pumps and setting up this website. Then it rained which was nice because we laid some turf last week and it needs a lot of water to get it established. It’s a very hardy type of grass that won’t need much water when it’s mature but rain is perfect for it right now.

I’m guessing we’re about a month away from having the flat complete enough to where Cintia and I can move in. There’ll still be some minor details to finish but we should be able to get our occupancy certificate from the council. That will allow Mum to rent out the main house again (we’ve been living in the front house while we’ve been building out the back) and we’ll be able to start the next phase of the experiment… living in the flat and monitoring how it actually performs.

This is something that is very seldom done by the people who design and build buildings. They almost never go back to see how things actually work and so they seldom learn from their mistakes. I’ve learned an amazing amount through the planning and building phases of this project so far. And I expect to learn as much again from carefully monitoring its performance for at least the next year. And by living in it myself I’ll find out the little things that work well or don’t work. Hopefully I’ll have a chance to fix or at least improve the ones that don’t but I intend to be honest about them in this blog and not just brag about the cool stuff that does work.

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