Build Diary 13

Since our last blog post, over a month has passed and it looks like everything is really starting to come together now!

All three main structures (Garage, Kitchen/Living, Bedroom) are officially up and have roofs on them. This means that now we can work in the much needed shade as Bali’s dry season continues to spoil us with sunny and hot days.

Since the last update, we’ve installed our recycled timber decking which covers the entire length of the walkway connecting the main living area with the bedroom, and which at the very end, forms a small back deck overlooking the garden and most beautiful jungle. It feels great to finally be able to walk the length of the house “up” on the deck without having to jump up and down between the three buildings.

A few weeks ago, we also had our polished concrete floors installed in the Kitchen/Living area, which since writing this post, needed to be fixed for cracking and discolouring. We always knew that concrete has a porous nature and that cracking would occur, however we didn’t expect it to happen so quickly… It still looks absolutely amazing though and we’re actually kind of loving the “used” look.

In the garden, we put over 50 bamboo plants into the ground to form a “fence” along the Western side of the property, plus an additional 50 Pisang Calithea’s to go in between the bamboo to make it all nice and lush.

We’ve also had our workers Ketut and Wayan come back to build a natural bamboo fence, which runs along the back of the property and makes our backyard a little more private. For this, we needed to order 100 poles of bamboo which at 5.5 metres each equates to over half a kilometre of bamboo!

The other reason why we wanted some kind of a fence is that in Bali, there needs to be a proper boundary to keep people out. It’s often just the locals walking through private property to pick some fruit or coconuts, which they cannot reach from their own land, or because they’ve been simply doing it this way for many years. This is certainly very different from our Western culture, and something that needed to be addressed.

In the kitchen, we have so far tiled the splash back and started installing the MDF for the living rooms walls. Sean really wanted the look of a grooved lower wall, so we bought a router and grooved the sheets of MDF ourselves to achieve the look of V-Joint Paneling (or VJ in short). Even in Bali, nothing is impossible!

There are probably a thousand other small things that need covering, but this will have to wait until the next update. For now, it’s time to rest for the night and recharge our batteries, because the next week is going to be BIG.

Until then, greetings from us and our site inspector “Bulan”.

Thanks for reading,

Anna & Sean