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…