Working on the inside of the house

It’s been a whole month since I posted about our house build. Lots of things have been going on. Not only are we working on the house itself but we have to take care of the animals as well. Most of them feed themselves as we are now in the rainy part of the year and the pasture grows nicely. The only ones we need to feed daily are the three pigs we have in a corral where they are working on producing plant feed. I will talk more about that in a separate post. The cows require a different kind of daily attention. We rotate them every second day onto a new paddock and for that we need to move electric fencing. That takes about an hour every day.

Drywall

Inside the house we have put up a lot of drywall with insulation behind. Installing the drywall sheets goes relatively quick but putting in all those screws takes time. Unfortunately to late for us but I did learn about a better tool for the job.

What really takes up time is applying the drywall mud and cleaning up the surface. We had to learn to do it right by delivering a bad job first and then fixing it. Every wall is done better than the one before.

In the picture you can also see our new wood stove. It uses wood pellets and should keep us warm during fall and winter. As of the moment temperatures have dropped to something like 2C at night and 10C during the day. However, once the sun comes out here in Andalucia it gets very warm. Just make sure to stay in the sunlight. In the shade it is cold. A good idea is to put on a T-shirt in order to not sweat and then a vest over it to keep the upper body warm and protected from the wind. Don’t forget to protect the neck and throat.

Porches

Finally we also got around to make some of the porches in the front and back of the house. The material for that was lying around for months and had been partially used up for other things since then.

Here is the beginning of the front porch with some makeshift stair. In the background you can see that we still use some of the space to store drywall sheets to keep them dry.

In the back we had a platform that came out of an earlier stage of the build when we were still trying to keep the house much simpler. The remaining portion is now closed up but still not completely finished. But at least we can now use the area and won’t fall into an open hole.

Floor

Two rooms have been fully painted, which allowed us to put in the insulated floor. We have XPS panels glued to the black plywood and on top of that wood flooring made by the Spanish company FINSA.

This room is eventually going to be the office. At the moment we use it to prepare lunch while we are there during the day.

Next to it is the bedroom. It’s great to have a clean space again where we can put the furniture that we had to move into the construction site in August when we had to leave our temporary apartment and move into a much smaller one.

Lights

We decided to have lots of LED panels in the ceiling. Maybe a bit too many but then it provides a lot of light. It’s like having the sun inside the room. Here is an impression of the still unfinished main area of the house.

That much light feels good on the eyes. As most of the days here in Andalucia have bright sun outside it makes sense to have a similar amount of light inside the house. That avoids the shock when going outside and when going inside you don’t step into a dark room and need to wait a moment to adapt. Our electric energy is free as the sun provides it via the solar panels. The LED panels don’t consume much and don’t get warm at all.

Heating

As I prepare this blog post we are finishing up on installing these tiles that will support the weight of the wood stove and provide a surface that won’t suffer when ash finds its way onto it while cleaning the stove.

Drowing in new growth

Now during fall we are getting quite a bit of rain every few days followed by days with a lot of sunshine. That makes the plants grow and we are starting to get drowned by vegetation around the house.

The sheep are enjoying it.

03 Nov 2018

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