Has anyone seen the sun around here lately?? This weather is beginning to really grate on us all now. The huge rainwater harvesting system we put in back in the spring has barely been below full capacity and is beginning to create it’s own little ecosystem within the tanks. Wonderful and very interesting though this is, it doesn’t do the pumps much good when they suck it all up!!
We are now on our second round of CPD presentations to architects which includes a wider range of materials. We cover earth in modern construction, Thermafleece sheep’s wool insulation and the wonderful Thermoplan block system with a Hemcrete update at the end of it all. We also show the BBC’s Working Lunch Video which is a fantastic, impartial overview of the first large-scale housing development in Suffolk to use Hemcrete. It has again been really well received and gives us a great opportunity to talk to architects involved in sustainable projects around the region.
Our construction side has now formally been branded as ‘Natural Building Solutions’ and we are in the process of getting a website up and running with lots of information about the services that it provides, the materials used and examples of recent projects completed. The theme of the site will be similar to the main Back to Earth site but will use a different colour scheme and some different branding. We’ve decided to go a little more wacky with this site and have lots of hemp leaves dotted around it which will hopefully stimulate interest all by itself!!
Natural Building Solutions has been making leaps and bounds with both Hemcrete construction and with the new spray render system we are using. The team has recently completed a large garden studio/garage up near Wellington in Somerset, this building was then finished using the Limetec Basecoat render, a pre-mixed, dry, hydraulic lime render. The render was spray applied and planed back to give a soft, flowing finish which tied in well with the adjacent old cob house.
The render sprayer is also capable of spraying ready mixed lime putty mortars as well, which was put to good use on an old Farmhouse near Crediton. Re-rendering the walls consumed 18 tons of lime mortar, the spraying also made the job extremely easy and probably saved a couple of weeks in time and an awful lot of manual handling in the process. We have yet to invest in the Hemcrete sprayer as the size of the jobs we are currently undertaking doesn’t warrant us taking on a small mortgage to pay for it just yet. Judging by the number of projects we are seeing on drawing boards though, it will not be too long before we do.