Friday 30 January 2015

Bees, births and builds

I am quite scared of bees and wasps… nasty things that fly too close to your face and get in your ice-cream when you are trying to eat it…
But I have a friend, Oksana who is a beekeeper and sells the most wonderful honey. You can see what Oksana’s honey looks like here. This has given me a new appreciation of bees, so I thought I should face my fear, and get up close and personal with some bees…
Duncan, Jack and I went over at midday on a sunny day (apparently this is a good time to visit bees as they are mostly out!). Wearing gum boots, suits, gloves and head gear, we jumped on the back of Oksana’s truck and headed out to the hives…



Oksana was so relaxed standing by the hive with no head gear and gloves. I guess they are her bees and she knows them quite well... We saw a small hive being dismantled and there was the Queen in all her glory… and she has to lay 2,000 eggs a day. I'm glad I'm not a Queen...


We also saw a bee struggle out of his wax case and come out into the world for the first time; a bee birth… amazing!


Other news from our little piece of Coromandel heaven is that our house build is progressing. We have been preparing the floor slab and have just poured the floor, and am now hoping for some rain to cool the concrete as it dries. We are going for a waxed finish so this is the final surface… no pressure… it just has to be perfect!




Next, we will be putting up the framing and the roof… exciting times!

Monday 5 January 2015

Progress on site

Progress on site. How exciting to even be typing those words…
Duncan and I got our building permit on 21 November 2014 so we could finally begin building our new home.

We started by putting up wooden profiles so we could see where the building was going to sit on the land. Immediately we realized that it was too close to our eastern boundary and needed to be sited further west on the site. Actually turning a car round in the amount of room that we had allotted for the parking area wasn’t easy and immediately showed that this was going to be a problem.


Putting the string lines up on the profiles brought home to us that the site wasn’t at all flat and got progressively less flat the further west we moved… we now had a fall of about 2 metres from one end of the building to the other. Our building is approx. 28 metres long but only one room wide… So in order to rectify this, we had to bring in 8 truck-loads of gravel to build up that end of the site. A little roller came on site to roll the gravel flat and make a secure base for our living room (which will be the most westward room). This is a view of the footing holes in the foreground and the roller and gravel in the background. 

It was fun taking photos of a building that wasn’t there! I started thinking about some kind of time-lapse that I could create by taking photos from the same angle over the following months.



We also started thinking about the land as a resource with summer coming. Our rental out at Wyuna Bay has incredibly poor soil and is in an exposed location, so isn’t the best for vegetable growing. So we started making some vegetable beds that we could start now, and enjoy once we are living on the land. 

A layer of cardboard to kill the kikuyu grass, then a wooden frame pegged into the ground, followed by alternate layers of topsoil and horse poo (luckily the horse lives in the field next door). Duncan, Jack and I got stuck in a few weeks back...




...and now our veggie garden is blooming! 

Happy New Year everybody! Let’s hope 2015 is a fruitful year in every sense…