The long goodbye to the blue hut

So the builders have been busy- and the timber cladding is slowly going up. I think of it as a reverse strip tease!

I only had the little point and click camera, and conditions were not the best, but I think you can get the idea.

Rob has been busy painting every single one of those boards with a preservative to stop the boards going silver, or black with mould. It really is very smelly, after a day helping him move the boards around we both ended up with head aches. Not nice. But he's nearly finished. Will post more as the blue continues to disappear.

A little botany- part 1

TreeFlip image courtesy of Rob Wiltshire.

I wanted to share a little botany with you this morning, I've been talking about the timber we're using to build the hut, and it wasn't til the other week when my workmate asked me "what is myrtle", that I realise not everyone has (mis)spent their youth traipsing around the bush looking at the native plants!

Luckily for me I know the author of TreeFlip quite well, and he was happy for me to share the relevant pages. I do laugh at his descriptions, I think his personal bias towards certain timbers for furniture or his favourite plant for honey are thinly veiled!

Celery top pine was named for the celery-like appearance of its "leaves". These are actually not leaves but flattened branches called cladodes, that have taken over the photosynthetic role for this tree. The trees can get up to 30m tall and look like this:

Image courtesy of http://www.tastimber.tas.gov.au/SpeciesDetailsGeneral.aspx?SpeciesID=9

Celery top is a natural, durable and tough, fine grained timber. The wood is creamy white when freshly cut and darkens to a mellow rosy gold hue over time and with exposure to sunlight. Slowly grown, it has a hardness, strength, and density not normally associated with conifers.

Image as above

The timber for the outside of the hut is vertical, dressed, celery top boards. It looks quite blond at the moment (similar to my old hair colour) but once coated it will darken to a golden honey colour. Rob is heading down today to start coating the boards, at the moment they're in our bedroom and the hall way to keep them from the rain.

Anyway that's enough botany for this morning!

Timber

Last week was fairly quiet at the hut, a few things were meant to arrive, but they didn't. Which is something we get used to. We did get to see the start of the window seat, the only piece of bespoke furniture we're having made, (sorry I had to use bespoke, so very Kevin McCloud of me). It was nice to see the our timber dressed and being put to good use. The window seat will be made of celery top and myrtle, to match all our retro furniture finds. You may have noticed that Rob and I are a tad obsessed with timber. A couple of years ago we went to an auction in huonville, we ended up with 2 ute loads of timber, and I only left him for a moment! So it's nice to see some of it now being used in the window seat and the kitchen cabinets and bench tops.

Today we headed down to the hut to check on progress. I could see the two water tanks from the top of the drive, and the septic came into view as we got to the hut. Both dogs had to bark at them. I wandered over to the hut, and noticed the workhorses had been moved and there were tyre marks. Now this got me interested, we have learned that builders don't tidy up after themselves unless it's in the way of something else. So I looked in the door, to see timber. At this point I may have gotten a little excited, and squealed for Rob to come and open the door. Inside sat a neatly stacked pile of myrtle for the skirting and trim inside, and the promised half of the celery top cladding for the outside. We've been waiting for it for awhile now. The builder and Rob were hoping for it in December, sadly the sawmiller had lost the order in his ute. Then there was Christmas, then there were issues with the cutting blades for creating the shiplap joins. So he kept promising next week.

Today was that week.


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P.S. Sorry the photos we took were a bit sad (silly little camera and quite dark) so we'll head down for some photos tonight.