Our journey to living off grid and self sustainably in South Africa: In December, we continue building our eco-friendly home, a timber frame clad with zincalume. Everything has come together so fast!
It’s Quick
I’m obviously a fan of timber frame building, since I’ve chosen to build my house this way. But damn, you’ve really got to give it props for speed!
Before the first week of December was over, the external walls for the new cabin were up, complete with sisalation, and the Zincalume cladding was going on to the walls and roof!
Enclosing The Middle Section
Then came the really exciting part – the big glass sliding doors and windows we’d picked up off Gumtree could go in!
It definitely turned out to be more challenging than we expected, to figure out the glass. We’d managed to get the sliding doors from a guy in Simonstown, who had used them as part of a custom build to enclose his veranda. When Russ went to collect them they were sitting in his garage, so we never got to see exactly how he’d had them. All we knew is that there was over 7 meters of glass to work with.
We wanted to enclose either side of the middle gap between the two cabins with it, which meant we had 4m gaps on either side. Simple, no?
No.
The sliding doors were different makes, and completely taken apart, so it took us a while just to figure out which doors went together and which railing frames they’d fit in. One of the doors was just a piece of glass – no frame around it at all. Russ and I spent half a day shuffling the huge panes around on the ground trying to line them up, then I sat trying to draw a configuration that would have both sides covered in matching/working doors.
Then we had to communicate this higgledy piggledy mishmash to our bemused builder, who would also need to whip up a frame for the one door out of wood (since that’s all we had) precise enough to fit into the sliding door railing. Nooooo problem.
Thank goodness our builder was up for the challenge!
Finally, the last bit of cladding above the sliding doors was completed, and the edges were lined with wood to cover the joins.
Boom!
And just like that we had a house to spend our first Christmas in!
So much to be thankful for!
UP NEXT
Tune back in with us another 6 months down the line to find out how we’re doing…
