Phone Grove

Seven weeks after application and a number of chase-ups, and the council have finally given us a road number!!! We are no longer just a Block number - maybe now the RTA will let me change my address on my licence - the website refused to recognise the address and the person on the phone didn't believe me that I was moving in 'tomorrow'.
     Surprisingly the easiest part for us seems to have been the phone line - Telstra didn't know what they were talking about every single time I talked to someone, they all assumed that I was either A) a city block with a connected line to an existing house or B) a rural block with no line up from the road and an existing house. In fact, our block has a line (or two) running across the front of the block parallel to the road about 80 metres back, and this was run through back in the 1970s for some very strange reason, since this road is very quiet now and was much much quieter back then! Once we had the local guy on the block (if only we could have talked to him on the phone!) he knew how it all worked and realised that the official Telstra maps are pretty much all completely wrong.
     So he said it was ok for us to dig a trench about 2 metres away from the concrete madison box, and put up a garden shed and he would install it into that. So we spent 3 days in the pouring rain digging this trench through rocks and mud, and the rest of the week assembling a little garden metal shed which we bodgied up with a bits of wood to try and create a flat surface - I even made up a bit of a wooden floor with some bits that were lying around, we found an old but usable chair in one of the sheds and convinced the ants living in an old esky to move out so we even had a table!
     The Telstra guy came back the next week when we weren't there and connected the whole thing up hopefully with no problems, and even gave us a phone which doesn't require electricity. It was quite important safety-wise to have a phone as there is NO mobile phone reception anywhere in the area. The biggest problem with it now is that we will probably never actually hear it ring, what with having 17 acres to wander around on, and if we do hear it ring we won't make it to the phone in time to answer! But having been warned by a local to NEVER run for the phone after a horror story of another local who fell and injured themselves quite seriously when they tried, it is now a rule on our place. Thankfully because we have a Telstra account we can use the *10# option :)
     Here's a picture of our phone shed... Please note the pile of dirt on the right hand side from digging the trench...