Category: Uncategorized

Just for something different….let’s build a retaining wall! On to the last one, thankfully – across the front of the shed, which will define the slope for the original driveway to come down and meet the level of the carport, and down the back of the shed to stop the neighbour’s carport from ending up in mine. Seems important. The main complication with this wall is the constantly changing levels – both sides start at the height of the concrete kerbing under the hibiscus hedge,…Continue Reading “Shed retaining wall” →

More retaining walls – yay! I’m glad I bought the relatively flat block in Swan View, because some of the steeper blocks would have killed me. 🙂 Current plan is to smash out the retaining walls as quickly as I can, then get my sand pads done – both pads butt up against the walls, so it makes a lot of sense to get them done first. Earthworks guys want to do the house pad first so they’re not trucking sand in across the shed…Continue Reading “House retaining wall” →

Next step was to get the retaining walls behind the shed and house installed. This has a couple of benefits: I have a nice well-defined edge for the sand pads. I can run all my services in the cavity behind the walls, before backfilling. Had a crack at digging the trench alongside the shed myself, with the help of a friend and a jackhammer. In 6 hours we exhausted ourselves and got….10 of the 40-odd meters of trench dug. 🙁 Back to the experts…. Called…Continue Reading “More trenching!” →

Found a temporary meter box on Gumtree, yoinked it and had it installed by a local sparkie. Trying to avoid having one of these posts as a permanent thing, just because they’re ugly – according to Western Power, if your meter box is more than 27m from the dome then you have to install a post near the dome. At last measurement, my meter box will be 25m from the dome. Not pushing the limits at all. 🙂 I had this post put in on…Continue Reading “First stages to getting power” →

Now that I have some idea where the buildings are going to go, I can start working on how I’m going to run services all over the block – the downside of an 80m-long block (with the ATU and water tank right down the back) is that there’s a LOT of trenching. I hate to say it, but I’m almost getting sick of driving excavators. 🙁 Another long day in the driver’s seat, but got most of it done despite running into a lot of…Continue Reading “Life in the trenches” →

In one of those random encounters that you get from time to time, a bloke walked down the road while we were doing the crossover the other week and stopped for a chat. Turns out he used to run a small building company, but now his nephew (who lives two doors down from me…wait…can I say “two doors down” before I even have a door? I guess the neighbours have a door and he has a door, so let’s go with it) does the building…Continue Reading “More earthworks!” →

At last, breaking some ground! Two days with my favourite excavator and my tireless offsider waving the hose around to keep some of the dust down and the levels measured, and I’ve nearly got the ‘cut’ part of ‘cut and fill’ done. The shed area was first – scraped the top ~150mm off first, to get all the grass and what topsoil exists into its own pile for later re-use, then got into digging. Hit the hard semi-sandstone’y type stuff pretty quickly, but managed to…Continue Reading “Earthworks!” →

Once I start earthworks, I’m going to dig a massive hole at the base of the existing driveway…so I needed a new crossover. Recruited a few family members, including my sister who (as I might have mentioned) is a huge fan of….using compactors. Still can’t explain it, but very happy to exploit it. 🙂 I’d already moved a few pieces of concrete kerbing to protect the trunks of the trees, and moved a big pile of the dirt from the ATU hole to somewhere near…Continue Reading “A new way in” →

This felt like the first bit of construction that I couldn’t undo – of course this is a bit silly, what with 6 tonnes of ATU already in the ground, but for that I just sat around and watched people install it – this was stuff I’d put together myself which makes a difference…somehow. Dad and I spent the morning tweaking the propping and fixing the alignment of the posts – a few of them shifted when I put the long strips of rebar on…Continue Reading “Retaining wall: No going back now!” →

The day the water tank was installed I had also planned to dig the post holes for the retaining wall on the north side of the shed. This is a vehicle surcharge wall (fancy name for “I’m going to drive on the uphill side of it, so it needs to handle the weight of vehicles”) so there’s shorter panels and therefore more posts. In all I needed 22 post holes, 450mm wide and up to 1.2m deep. Hired a 1.8t excavator, post holer attachment and…Continue Reading “Retaining wall” →