12 - 17 Jun 10

Saturday 12 June

We had a meeting today with Alicia and Daniel, the architects, to run through the things we have to do to the roof beams to make them strong enough to comply with the earthquake regulations. Unfortunately we have to add metal brackets to all the joints along the front and greenhouse/main room joint. Loads of extra work, but at least we don't have to take the roof off and start again - yehey!

Gabions

I've been reading a book on permaculture recently which gave me the idea of using gabions for the walls to our water tank instead of tyres. After all, our land is full of rocks and there'll be no need to finish the outer parts as they'll look like the terrace walls we already have.

I mentioned it to Dave on the way to the 'ship which started us wondering about construction, and on the way home we came across these....gabions!!

Wednesday 16 June

In search of a metalworker who can supply us with the brackets we visited one of our local ones to find them constructing this domed roof out of metal - similar to what we'd like for the round room roof. After finding the gabions on Saturday I think someone's trying to help us!

The gold metal tiles remind me of the Clangers - anyone remember them? We're not going to have a Clanger jacket as our finish I hasten to add.

A Clanger with the Soup Dragon (my favourite).

Thursday 17 June

There's a 12 month backlog at the Diputacion in Almeria which means our Building Permission paperwork is sitting at the bottom of a very big pile and unlikely to surface until January next year. Sooo, we paid a visit to the Planning Officer at Sorbas this morning to see if he could hurry things along, or take it back to process himself. He'll let us know next week what's happening.

While in Sorbas we took the opportunity to visit a different metalworker and found these lovely chunky brackets - well, we didn't exactly find them, he made them up for us out of a forged metal beam.

Ok, it would look better without them, but if we have to have them (which we do) these'll keep that rustic look, especially once they're chiseled into the wood a bit. We're going to try one next week.

Here's the metal beam being cut and cleaned. There'll be 52 of these to do. We had to go with a C beam because they don't make L's with a long enough leg. It'll mean extra work cutting off one of the tails (and wasted metal) but we've run out of ideas and sources.

Sunseed Open Day

This Saturday, 26 June, Sunseed is having another open day. Get along there if you can and support their work. We'll see you there!