New Life

          It has been amazing how quickly the messy clearing with its lumpy dirt and rocks has renewed itself with new life. Grass has been popping up almost everywhere, and baby acacia trees too. There would be a massive seed bank of lomandra, casuarina, and tea tree - along with the various varieties of eucalypt - just sitting in the soil waiting for an opportunity. In fact I was thinking that I should dig some lines with the pointy side of our mattock out at the front of our land - the part where the trees haven't been cleared - and get some acacias growing out there for extra privacy. They love growing in open disturbed places and it seems like the perfect opportunity.
          The lone banksia tree on our place which we specifically saved from the clearing has rewarded our thoughtfulness with a burst of flowers. Suddenly the tree is getting light that it never had before, and I hope this is a sign that the tree is much happier now. Otherwise it could mean that the tree is about to die and wants to flower one more time before then! The birds, insects and glider possums will be very happy to have a feed of delicious nectar.

          Some of the animals seem to like the new habitat too - there are a couple of Willy Wagtails who have claimed it as their territory. They spend all day flying across the dirt and perching on sticks, waggling their tails and chasing insects. When the Yellow-tufted Honey-eaters come too close the Wagtails chide them, letting them know that the area has already been claimed.
          The microbat also seems to enjoy flying along the open edges of the clearing at dusk, having a clear path to chase insects instead of having to avoid trees while flying! I like to imagine the bandicoot has had a bit of a wander down there too, checking out all the disturbed grubs making for an easy dinner. The bull-ants also seem to be having a lovely time, biting us when we stand too close to their nests. I am trying the method of pouring boiling water down the nest right next to the house site, but it is not completely successful yet. Any suggestions about how to safely remove such aggressive monsters?

Footing Holes Dug

     Well the good news is that the footings holes are dug, a pretty easy job and hardly any rocks encountered. The bad news is that the truck completely destroyed our new driveway when it arrived. The guy did his best to fix it with his little digging machine, and it wasn't exactly his fault because there were a couple of dodgy bits of driveway which had hidden trapped compartments of water. This was due to the hole left from the felled tree, the clay under the road base, and the swale failing to keep water from running all the way down. Anyway eventually the truck was positioned so that it could unload the digger and roll up to the house site to dig the footings.

          Josh was a fantastic assistant who carefully positioned the auger onto each marked spot, pulled rocks out of the way and picked bits of root stuck on the end of the auger off. It was a lovely sound hearing the auger hitting those rocks and just digging right past them, much easier than trying to do it by hand! The last two holes were a bit tricky as they had a lot more rocks, and ended up being a lot wider than they needed to be, in order just to get past those rocks to get sufficient depth. We didn't need the rock breaker or anything so that was a relief.

          So now we have 4 rows of 5 holes with an extra 3 at the western end for the verandah, each hole 60cm deep and 45cm wide. Then we got the guy to dig a bit of a pad at the eastern end for the tank to sit - I was thinking that we could pour extra concrete there but apparently it would be better if it was just sand for the tank base. A bit more research before the tank is delivered and we will work it out exactly what we are going to do for that. Now we will have to figure out something else for a place to put the extra leftover concrete - a little shed slab maybe?
          There was even time to ring the council at the end of the day, and schedule them to come and check the footings, which should be early next week sometime. Meanwhile we just need to tidy up the holes by hand and dig out the last little bits of dirt and rock. Then comes the tricky part - waiting until the driveway seems like it will be ok for a big heavy cement truck to drive up it. And hoping that it doesn't rain.

Official Construction due to start tomorrow.

          Tomorrow we are due to have a fellow come out to dig our footings holes for us. He has an auger attached to a bobcat or backhoe or something, and some kind of rock breaker as well. Hopefully it will be enough to get through the infamous rocks around here. We have a mixture of smallish rocks up to rockmelon size which aren't too hard to dig out, bigger rocks - beachball size and bigger - which are almost impossible to dig out, and rock shelves which are only a relatively short distance under everything else.

           There is a great variety in the types of rocks that we have dug up here, some are light blue speckles, some are dark purple-black sparkles, some are delicate white and yellow, some are shades of orange and red, and the rock shelf itself is sandstone. All are amazingly beautiful, especially when you crack one open and it reveals layers of different colours - usually a dark centre surrounded by light blue speckles and rounded with orange and red. Sometimes when digging and the metal blade hits the rock quite hard - it gives off a smell like gunpowder. Other times it gives off a shower of sparks.

           We know that the rocks are not something annoying that gets in the way, but instead are a great resource which provides us with free material to build with - garden walls, retaining walls, maybe even shed walls in the future. At the moment I have been putting the rocks around some of the little plants which survived the clearing - such as tea-tree and lomandra - and they instantly look like absolutely beautiful little gardens. It is great to have a little taste of how great the site will look in the future - after a lot of hard work!

           So we have been busy trying to get the house site prepared and ready for the digging guy to do his thing. He says the job should only take a couple of hours if all goes well. In orded to get the house site cleaned up first we had to pick up all the random branches and rocks lying around on the surface, then rake all the lumpy dirt piles and hollows leftover from the excavator clearing the trees. Suddenly the small floor area of the house of 70 square metres seemed like a large area when having to do all this work! Then we put up some lines pegs and tied string lines to mark out the external dimensions of the house site, followed by measuring out where the holes need to go exactly and marking these spots with sticks and yellow spray paint.

           After we have had the holes dug, we need to contact the council to come out and inspect the footings. They say they need 48 hours notice, so that would make it early next week sometime at the soonest. My neighbour says that when he built his house, he just sent them some photos of the holes with a board across it and a tape measure down it. Perhaps the council will be okay with that - we will see.

And then after the council approves the holes, we need to ring the concrete people to bring out the truck to fill the holes. I don't think they need more than a day or two notice, but we will see what happens when it comes to the crunch. And of course during this week or so after the holes have been dug, we will be hoping that it doesn't rain. We can plan to cover the holes with tarps and corrugated iron and see how effective that is at keeping water out of them! Also if it rains then our driveway will get muddy and slippery again, which makes it difficult for vehicle access - especially big concrete trucks! There was not a cloud in the sky all day today, we'll see how auspicious that turns out to be...

Clearing Finished!

     This morning it threatened rain which would have stymied the finishing of our tree clearing for possibly weeks, but held off with nothing more than a misting sprinkle and now it is all finished. The cloud cover was a lovely cool blessing after the last few days being unpleasantly stinking hot. We also got the boys to put a swale above the house site so that water running down the hill will not fill up the holes for the footings once they have been dug. This afternoon - after the excavator was loaded back onto the truck and safely driven away - the rain began in earnest and it has been very heavy for a few hours now. So I guess that means the swale is being given a good test!
     We have some many piles of trees that it creates a tall unbroken wall for about 100 metres, it could almost work as a fence for stock if we blocked off the gaps. Except for goats, who would just have a ball jumping them!

     We decided not to dig the greywater trench yet, as the spot where the report told us to put it is actually UPHILL of the house site. I don't know much about plumbing, but I am pretty sure that would be a bad thing. We will leave that to worry about that at some later stage.
     Next task is to tidy up the ground - pick out all the rocks, pick up the random sticks, rake out the dirt so that it is roughly level, and spread some mulch and native grass and lomandra seeds. This is gonna take a while since it is such a large area! I was also thinking that it would be nice to have to slope vaguely terraced, with rock walls between each level. That's also something for later after we have built the house I think.
     It is almost time to start planting fruit trees, but I think we should wait until we have a pump which we can use to pump water up from the creek to water the fruit trees. Also it's only a small creek so in the dry season there will be very little water available. Don't want the poor things to die!

Trees are down.

      Today the man came and hopped into the excavator and knocked down a lot of trees. Most of the trees. He only had to stop cos it was the end of the day! Now we have a big area of disturbed dirt and several big piles of fallen trees. Our driveway was also repaired and loaded up with road base, hopefully now it will be accessible to those people who don't have 4WDs!

     There should be just one more day's work in it, clearing the rest of the trees, finished the driveway, creating a swale above the house-site, and probably digging the greywater trench. If we can figure out where it should go!

Something happened!

     Not much has happened, but at least it's better than nothing. Finally our bulldozer arrived to clear the trees - only it's not a bulldozer, it's an excavator. They decided that since the phone lines run through the area to be cleared, that an excavator would be more suitable for the job. We could have gotten an excavator out here more than 6 months ago but were told by many people, who seemed to know what they were talking about, that a bulldozer would be much better. Oh well.

     After repeated "We'll be there tomorrow"s they finally turned up only an hour late, and unloaded the excavator off the truck and drove it up the driveway. Gosh it was a tight fight through the gate and I thought they were going to have to buy us a new gate for a few seconds there.
     Then they had to go off for a meeting and won't be back to tomorrow. So it's not much progress, but at least they now have a vested interest in coming back - we can hold their excavator for ransom!
    

No Change on the Block Yet...

Still Waiting...

      Nothing has actually happened since the last blog entry, but we on the verge of something happening so I will write about that instead. We have had a couple of bulldozer operators come out to chat about clearing our trees, after waiting months for someone to

a) advertise other than word of mouth, with their actual phone number

b) answer their phone, at all, ever

c) actually come out when they say they will come out

d) give us a quote less than $10,000 (yes that is TEN THOUSAND DOLLARS)

      They both said it would be a fairly easy job which could be done in one day. It's hard to imagine so many trees being knocked down in such a short time, but I guess I will be seeing it with my own eyes eventually. We have complicated things a bit with wanting the front of the driveway fixed as well, so that will most likely turn it into a two-day job. The most annoying thing about these guys is that they tried to convince us to move the house site somewhere else. We said that we don't actually have a choice about where to put the house due to having to be

a) 50m from the creek

b) not clearing 20m from the creek

c) 33m from the boundary due to bushfire restrictions

d) 50m from the road

      and showed them the lines in which were are restricted - but we still had to listen to a big monologue about how he thought this other spot was a much better spot. Even though it was RIGHT next to the boundary fence. I am getting sick of saying the same thing over and over - I should just write it out and hand them a written document! Besides the fact that it's all council approved and too late to make any big changes now without paying more money!!!

      Then there was that hilarious confused 5 minutes while the guy tried to process us telling him that we don't have a car. We tried to move the conversation on but he was just standing there, shaking his head and muttering. 'Don't have a car! .... ! .... ! ' We always tell them that we get around with 2 feet and a heartbeat, as it really is a lovely walk to the bus-stop or into town, with the trees and the cows and the birds. Anyway...

      The first bulldozer guy said that he wouldn't want to start any work until we had someone come out and find EXACTLY where the phone lines went through our property. If a tree is knocked down within root boundary of the lines, they could get pulled up and broken - and since everyone's phone lines further down the road goes through our place, that's a pretty big problem. So we rang round a couple of places and we were going to have to pay $400 - $500 - until one friendly guy said that he was down at Coffs Harbour which was too far to travel for a small job BUT he knew how we could get it done for free. He said that if we ring Telstra and tell them that we are on a rural property and haven't had a line survey done before, then Telstra would pay the contractor for us. So we did and one week later, had the line surveyor come out - for FREE!

      He made the job look easy, clicked a little machine onto the phone line and then walked around with another little machine - probably somewhat like a metal detector - marking the lines with big dot of blue spraypaint every 5 - 10 metres or so. He could even tell how deep they were and wrote that on the ground with the spray paint as well. Somebody told me that the lines would be maybe 1 and a half metres deep - well, these are as little as 40 cm deep and as much as 80 cm deep. There's a lot of rock around here, and under that rock there is more rock - a big rock shelf. So that did not surprise me.

      That solved the problem of bulldozing the trees - but created another problem. What do you think the chances were of the phone lines going right through our house site? Or of them going right through the EXACT MIDDLE of our house site? Well it turns out that the chances were 100% because that's where the line goes. I couldn't believe it, I thought it would be close, I thought it would be very close, but I didn't think it would be straight through the bloody middle.

      So I think we are just going to have to move the house site a few metres towards the road - that's one of the good things about it being such a small house, it only means about a 6 metre difference, and I am pretty sure the council won't even notice. All our maps are pretty rough anyway - and we don't even know exactly where the front boundary of our place is exactly. So basically the phone lines are just a small problem.

Now we are back to playing the 'waiting for the bulldozer' game all over again.