Council Approval

     The wonderful council has approved our application in the shortest possible time, with no complaints or adjustments of any of our documents that we submitted - pretty amazing, since we just made the whole thing up as we went along! Josh was incredibly talented at turning my hand-drawn maps into digital maps (I love drawing maps :) ) and we basically went with the principle that there is no such thing as too much information. I just wrote lots of stuff and hoped that the council would go 'Ah, too long, can't be bothered reading all this, I'll just skim it and stamp it with APPROVED' - and apparently it worked!
     Of course before we are properly approved-approved, we still have to install the composting toilet, grease trap and greywater trench from the caravan sink, which we will be starting tomorrow, and complete the Owner-Builder course. Josh will complete the course after we get back from the property, and then it's basically time to start living on the land. We are majorly panicking at the moment at how very little money we suddenly have left after paying for the kit home, so it definitely won't be long until we are starving to death! The good news is that is just coming into that time of year in which it will be suitable to start growing our own food, so better get onto that as soon as we are there permanently, and able to keep up the watering.
     Also we need to move the caravan to a new spot on the land, so have asked the nice people that we bought the caravan off in the first place, to come round and hook it up to their 4WD. Should be a relatively straight-forward and easy task, but there IS rain forecast... And we DO have clay soil in some parts... We need to move the caravan so that is it closer to the watertank, then we can either hook it straight up with a garden hose (might taste yucky?), or just hook it up from the 100L mini-watertank which we should be having delivered on Friday. I have a plan to raise this up on a 44-gallon drum and some planks, sounds somewhat precarious but we will see! Not sure which method will give best water pressure, but we should be able to figure something out with all the bits and bobs we have assembled. Also we need to move it so that there is a suitable place to dig the greywater trench, so it is closer to the composting toilet (for those middle-of-the-night emergency trips!), and so it is closer to the big shed. The big shed is where we will be storing all of our belongings, once we get them up from Sydney. Somehow. Sometime.
     The big shed also needs us to do some work on it before that, as woodborers are in the wood and this creates a very fine yellow dust that goes all over everything. We need to treat the wood so that a) the woodborers die and b) the yellow powder stops going all over everything. I have seen a product from Bunnings which seems suitable for this application, but another thing we will need in order to do this job, is a ladder. Such a long list of things that we need!
     The good news, is here is a shovel that we found on the property, which will help with all our upcoming digging!