More retaining wall fun

Categories Building, Infrastructure
More retaining wall fun

Physically draining day today prepping the retaining wall posts – what with me changing the foundation design, and hitting a lot of rock’ish type stuff, I had to shorten 16 of the 22 posts. Cue 7 hours with two grinders (one for cutting the concrete down to the embedded rebar, the other to cut the rebar) and a lot of lugging some very heavy posts around. The pretty red ends are painted to protect the now-exposed rebar from rusting out. Lesson of the day would…Continue Reading “More retaining wall fun” →

Magical sky-water

Categories Infrastructure
Magical sky-water

Some very unseasonal weather today – made a quick trip to the block armed with a laser level, a string line and a measuring stick, to see how far short of the required depth my trench was. Nice warm, sunny day quickly went south as a summer thunderstorm went over, sending me scurrying for the shed. Thankfully I’d just finished the measuring part and was just mucking about with a fat masonry bit in my drill, tidying up the trench walls. Got home to do…Continue Reading “Magical sky-water” →

Retaining wall

Categories Uncategorized
Retaining wall

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” →

Water tank

Categories Infrastructure, Utilities, Water
Water tank

One of the smaller sustainability features I wanted to include was a decent rainwater setup – ideally running the entire house off rainwater, with mains backup. My last house was run entirely off rainwater, as there was no mains supply in the area, and I found that worked really well – it had a ~100kL tank, which filled every winter except one (I think it was 2015?) when Perth’s rainfall was wildly below average, and that was enough to get the household through the summer…Continue Reading “Water tank” →