Stage 2A (7 units) have all been finished and over the Christmas holidays our new members have all moved in. Since we have formed the Earthsong Centre Trust we have received a Grant from the ASB Trust and an interest free loan from Waitakere City Council. This has given us enough capital to start building our Common House in the New Year. The Trust will be a joint owner together with all homeowners at Earthsong. Over the Christmas New Year period we have moved out of the old Tui House ready for its demolition into unit 21, which will be our temporary Common House.
Construction is going well, with the lower level walls rammed, the G block intertenancy floor fitted, and wall framing installed to F block. The earth walls are of very fine quality. Alan's building team are a great bunch, and they have been working really hard, most days from 7am to 6pm.
It is interesting to watch a different builder approach the same challenges as stage one. Having the stage one buildings to check makes it easier in some ways, and allows further development of some design details. An example is the bond beam formwork. Instead of using large amounts of boxing timber which is later wasted, Alan did small sections at a time using an easily moveable jig system, and poured the bond beams one at a time. This also miminised the use of expensive concrete pumps.
Another example is that Alan prefered, for maximum durability, to use solid flooring instead of laminating the mill style flooring. The 'mill' flooring, is now 125mm x 45 mm thick TGV macrocarpa.
As the winter is fast arriving we hope to have the F block roof on very shortly, but work on ramming the upstairs level of G block will mean some wet days for builders to come. The other reason for getting the roofs on is so that we can get the unit titles process underway.
Two non-building related things happened in the early part of this year. The first was Earthsong Eco-Neighbourhood entering into a formal Memorandum of Understanding with Waitakere City Council. This MOU recognises the common eco-city aspirations shared by both parties and how EE might help further WCC goals and objectives. In particular EE offers a hands-on demonstration for sustainable housing and related technologies.
Connected with this has been the setting up of an Earthsong Trust to act as future owner of the new Common House. This allows us to achieve two things, firstly to seek outside funding for building the facility, and second to formally establish a second complimentary use of the facility as specifically for hosting demonstration /educational tours /conferences and related events. These activities will fit nicely around the usual neighbourhood common house uses, and is a good outcome all round.
The actual building of blocks F+G started in earnest in the new year. Footings excavated and poured, and coloured concrete slabs poured, in preparation for the ramming crews to start work.
Quite some trial and error was used in finding the right mixes of earth to use so as to match the stage one walls. Test walls were made using variations of Steeles reddy coloured Woodhill / Houghton's more golden Murawai earths and McDonalds white lime / Redvale greyer lime. Also test cylinders were sent for lab strength and water permeability testing.
There are a whole raft of changes happening to Building industry acceptable standards around weather tight homes, and this makes getting consents for buildings right now a bit of a moving feast. However we had few problems because our basic building design is so weather proof. However we did make the decision to avoid kiln dried pine, which was used in some places in stage one, instead now using Douglas Fir.