A new yarn swift - home made

What is a yarn swift?
Well...you know when you are watching a movie in the evening and decide to ball up some yarn for a new project you are just dying to knit? The inevitable problem is to get someone (partner, visitor, small child, family dog) to hold the skein while you ball up the yarn. Nobody wants to do it so you end up trying to ball from a skein hung over two chair legs or over your own feet (which is a bit like yoga) leading to knots and snarls (knots in the yarn, snarls on your face). A yarn swift is a mechanical helper who will hold the yarn steady for you whenever you like while you make cute little balls of knitting materials.

I guess my mostly absent partner got very tired of being met at the door by arm loads of skeins because he made me a swift.

First we did a bit of internet research to find the right design;

Then the building began...

He built pretty much to the instructions in the clip (the difference between us... I can't follow instructions).

The base is a piece of spare ply

Finding the centre to drill the hole

Drilling the hole

The bolt thingy in the base for the arms to swing around.

A spacer so the arms aren't too close to the base.

Sawing the arms to the right length

The arms are notched so they sit level with each other

See

Drilling the hole right through the middle

A bit of copper pipe in the middle holds it all together

Yes...it spins

The finished unit. Thanks Hon

Building a laundry/ bath house with old tires, eco bricks and mud/ cement - part one; underway

The small excavator has been and gone (what a wonderful little machine it is) leaving a trail of half finished projects in its wake. The pad for the laundry/ bath house is dug out, levelled and a swale dug up hill to slow water flow down the slope and under the building. We also dug a spare toilet pit (for possible future use) and made a tank pad near the house for the 5000 gallon tank, then moved the big tank into place.
That has left me with piles of soil all over the place, some of which will be used to mix with cement and fill the foundation tires for the laundry. The best of that soil is destined to become the next section of my Hugelkultur beds and fill various planters around the place.

Rabbitto and a guinea fowl watch as the excavator digs the pad for the laundry

The laundry project has begun

The old tank on the humpy

Digging down so the bigger tank will fit under the gutter

The big tank which fits perfectly, but does dominate the front yard. Yes it oes tilt slightly down hill; the sand base sunk on that side.

Obviously part one of the laundry/ bath house project is not finished yet, but it has begun and I hope to have the foundations down by next weekend ('hope to' doesn't always equal'will' though). What an exciting time I am having at the moment.

Building a laundry/bath house with old tyres, eco bricks and mud/cement - part one; planning

We need a real kitchen...at the moment our kitchen is cobbled together from bits of unused furniture (my bench space is an old massage table) and a sink unit I was given. My partner's brother was given an old modular kitchen (from the 70's, so it will have some interesting colour combinations) which he is storing for us, but we can't put it in the humpy until we have a floor to put it on, which involves moving the current bathroom out.
The current bathroom has a floor made from an metal old window shade (one of those industrial metal grid things) with sheets of aluminium screwed onto it and lino over the top. This all has to come out (as well as the bath) and a new tire and ply floor go in. This means that we need a new bathroom away from the humpy while we build.

This is the current floor, you can see the metal frame around the lino. Not pretty, but it works.

The bathroom floor (please ignore the dirty shower curtain) 

The plan is to build a laundry/bath house up the slope from the vegetable growing area so that all that lovely (nutrient rich) water can use gravity to find it's way back to the Hugelkultur vegetable beds, instead of being carried out in buckets which is how I do it at the moment. Eventually there will be a shower in the house also (for those cold winter nights), but until then we will have the bath house. I want to have a go at building with old tyres and my eco bricks, because we have plenty of them around and because they create a negative carbon footprint when reused for building.

My plan so far is very simple;

 As usual my madness is being fueled by Youtube and internet research;

Technical tests on walls

Building with eco bricks

General information about Earthships (not exactly what I'm building)
Alternative building methods

The plan is to use a small excavator (hired for the occasion) to dig the foundation out (amongst other things), put the strip footing (tires and mud) and the four corner poles in. Then we will put up the pole frame and the roof. After that comes the corrugated iron outer walls, the floor and the bath put in (complete with outlet to drain to the vegetable garden). The first layer of eco bricks will go in around then too, but we will have to keep chipping away at the inner walls as eco bricks become available (we only make one or two per week). Getting water into the laundry for washing is easy; we will tap into the pipe running from the header tank up the hill to the humpy, and let gravity do it's thing. Getting water for the shower is another story as the fall is not great enough to gravity feed water to an overhead shower. That is a problem for part two.

Next comes getting the shower operational and putting up a new clothes line. Look out for part two.

                       

At last...the new toilet is operational

I finally decided to stop digging the toilet pit 'just a little bit deeper'and put it together. With the help of the whole family, we dug a final two wheel barrows of soil out of the pit, making the hole 1.5 cubic metres in size. Then my long suffering partner and daughters put the pedestal part together and bolted the whole lot to the floor.

The new pedestal on the floor. The floor is in two pieces and is not fixed, so it can be opened if the pit ever needs to be emptied.

The inside of the pedestal; The square inner lining is made from two old buckets with the bottoms cut out. This inner lining extends down through the floor and can be cleaned easily. The outer pedestal is a steel drum with the top and bottom cut out.

A flash new toilet seat bolted onto the pedestal completes the set up.

We put up the movable toilet tent over the whole thing for now.

So now the experiment begins, I hope this system works and we don't have to do this all over again.

The toilet building itself comes next, but that's another story.

How the humpy was built...or 'Slap it all together and hope it stands'

In the last couple of weeks I have had a few questions about how we came to build our little humpy in the bush, so I thought I would lay it all out here is question and answer fashion. If you have more questions, please leave a comment and I will answer them to the best of my ability.

Question one; Why did you build a temporary dwelling rather than a house?

Several reasons; firstly we could not fund the building of a house as we were busily trying to pay off the purchase of the land, secondly because we (well, I really, my partner doesn't care where he lives) were not sure where on the block would be the best place to build for passive solar and storm protection advantages.

Question two: How long did it take to build?

The real answer to this one is "Years", but we build the roof structure, some walls and a lock up area in about three weekends with the help of a borrowed tractor and some ropes (and a chansaw). We are still building the temporary dwelling now, making it more usable and completing little projects that make our life easier.

Question three; What is the humpy made from?

The humpy is made from round poles and corrugated iron. We began the building with cutting down enough trees from our property (of species scorned by white ants) to make 5 metre long poles for the uprights. After these were towed in, debarked (with an axe) and stood in the pre-dug  (1 metre) holes, we went out and got more trees for the beams on which the roof is built. On top of these beams we put smaller saplings which we attached the iron to. The timbers are held together with metal strapping which allows them to move as they expand and contract and move in the wind. All this was covered by sheets of (nearly) new roofing iron and a gutter made from PVC pipe cut in half was attached. Then we moved the caravan, and ourselves in.

The metal bits on the pole are the strapping, without which the roof would blow off.

A shot of the unlined ceiling of the bathroom. It shows how we spaced the saplings on the beams.

We paved the floor with outdoor pavers (cheap seconds) which gives us a hard, semi-level and (most importantly) sweepable floor.

This is the northern view of the humpy. The tarp is covering where the front door will one day be.

This is the western view, again this tarp is covering a section of wall not yet completed.

I know it all looks a mess (because it is) and Jerry built (because it is), but it is a very strong structure which has been through a lot of wild storms and has been built for a tiny cost from second hand materials. Our home is mostly happy, filled with lots of laughter (and some tears) and most of all is a haven for any creature who needs healing (sometimes human animals too). My house is a mess and always half finished because I have the concentration span of a may fly and the curiosity of a squid, meaning; I want to try everything, and I want to try it all now.

Pit toilet update

At last we have restarted work on the long planned five star pit toilet. It has become increasingly urgent for us to have a new toilet hole (the old one is getting uncomfortably near the end of it's usefulness).
Over the previous month or so we have all had a go at digging the pit deeper and wider, and it is almost deep enough at last. Today my (fairly reluctant) partner and eldest daughter were chased outside to begin building the framing for cement frame that will support the floor over the pit. Once the cementing is completed we will lay the floor over the pit (two sheets of really thick ply wood with a hole drilled in one), organize a pedestal (of some sort), put up a temporary shelter and it will be usable. The building part will be put together over the next six months or so.

The start of the frame for cement 'stem walls' to hold the floor up above the moisture and stuff.

The finished frame work, ready for cement.

The two sheets of ply for the floor, 

Nothing to do with toilets, but our baby guinea fowls have grown up enough to be out in the yard with their mum.

Everyone watches the cement mixer go around and around and around and...

Six or seven mixes later.

It's almost full.

Smoothing out the top.

All done.

Roady (the butcher bird) fancies himself a building inspector.

Last minute touch ups after the dogs and sheep have inspected the work.

We admire our work as the sun goes down.

The next stage is to dig some more out of the pit (the deeper the better) and to  begin the building of the toilet. I look forward to it.

Just updating this post with a photo or two of the recent digging.

The hole is now 1.4 x 0.8 x 0.9 m; a tiny bit over one cubic metre of hole (I think)

My eldest daughter busily scooping out gravelly soil.