Blobs!

G'day all!

Plenty happening at the Modest Manor at the moment.

Nathan has to blog all about his rainwater tank and the greenhouse at last in real progress.

But I have to show off this:

Yep, that is one of the walls of the fibre room, with wet smears from being washed with sugar soap and two sets of green blocks from me testing colours direct on the wall. I had been told to paint board with the colours but I couldn't get a real sense of how they worked so I painted blocks on the wall.

As it turned out, I didn't like any of the colours in particular. I did like the idea of having blocks of colour on the wall, so I bought more sample pots. I think I have 8 or 9 now.

I taped up part of the wall with not very straight lines, and discovered that I should've bought the ultra delicate wall masking tape, not the delicate stuff when i repositioned a line and took a chunk of paint off. I also discovered that the previous paint job was peachy pink. I have a feeling that the previous owner had moved back home to help his Mum out as she finished her twilight years, and he painted what was his study a more masculine beige.

Then throwing caution to the wind, I started randomly applying blobs of colour to the walls with a little roller. This is what happens when you blob it on:

Not very even and it doesn't line up all over the place, somewhat deliberately. Next I want to see if I can make some sort of tree trunk like lines, but that means buying some darker brown. Also I can start using the smaller roller, the 10cm one, and overpainting blobs and layering it up some - if I am lucky, it will look like an abstract forest. If I am not lucky, it will look like some gooberhead attacked the wall with lots of green blocks and not much skill.... Still if worst comes to worst, I now know which green I like best - leaf green (I think but am not sure that it is the green that is top left in the pic). I can paint the whole wall that colour. Plus we are still considering knocking that wall out to make a larger living/dining sorta area.

I blame Purplexity for making me finally start painting. She painted most of her place with her DH's help before she moved in. We've been here for four months and have only just started. But we are looking at kitchen places and bathroom places cos we need some renovations happening!

Soon we will show some pics of the garden and then hopefully the greenhouse being built. It is started but has a ways to go yet...

anon!

The greenhouse project

It's been rather quiet on the modest manor blog, but that doesn't mean nothing has been happening. Indeed it means that so much has been happening that we haven't had time to write anything. At our previous (rental) house we built a lovely greenhouse against the north wall of the house, we also had a window conveniently located so that we could let air in from the greenhouse into the main house. This worked so well for heating the house in winter that we've decided to build a greenhouse with this goal specifically in mind.

The plan calls for two 3.6m x 2.5m 'rooms. You enter from the west (where the current front path is). The west half will be desert, kept fairly dry, with a table and chairs. The west half has a door into the east half, which will be tropical, with a pond. Summer cooling is performed by drawing air through an inlet covered in a dense tomato or similar vine.

I'm using 1x3 hardwood flat walled frame, and twin-wall poly
as per this sketch:

I resketched this in QCad, which alerted me to a few errors in my floorplan.

There are a number of reasons for going this way:

• The space we have is fairly limited.
• We want multiple use for the space.
• A smaller greenhouse is easier to maintain.
• A smaller greenhouse is cheaper to build,
  
• and if it doesn't work properly, cheaper to rebuild.
  

The south wall will be a solar heater for the house, with fin tube at the top to preheat water for domestic hotwater. Similarly the top of the greenhouse will have a fin tube to heat the fish pond water and keep the greenhouse cool without venting on sunny winter days. The south wall will
be insulated to R1, the collector will be shaded mid-summer.

The south bench has a full length pond made from like plywood and EPDM pond liner for fish and water supply.



There is a trickle water fall with ferns on the west wall of the tropical house. which recirculates into the pond.

Yesterday and today Dad and I put together the water storage/fish tank. The tank itself weighs at least 100kg. I did the engineering calculations for the tank, here are some stats:

dimensions: 3.6m long x 0.9m wide x 1.2m tall, buried in the ground to be 0.8m above greenhouse floor level.
capacity: 3.5kL. Of course we had 30mm of rain the day before I got the tank assembled, but people assure me that it will rain again some day.
average pressure on long walls: 6kPa, i.e. 600kg per metre of tank. This means that the sides will have a sheer force of 2.6 tonnes. If the side walls weren't strengthened with steel straps the wood would bow out nearly 30cm in the middle. The bolts are rated to a shear strength of 12 tonne, the steel strapping 1.2tonne.

With any luck the whole thing will stay together when full. (It's a little scary, but I'm fairly confident of my calculations, if not my construction techniques)

We filled the tank with something like 500L to see if the liner would straighten out. It did, but it drifted off square which means I'll probably have to get into the tank and pull it square again, or alternatively, pump the water back into the rainwater tank it came from.