The house wot Juffy built
Took down the formwork for the wall on Thursday, and did most of the bottom row of panels. Put (most of) the rest of the panels in today, and did some work fixing the panels in place – one manufacturer suggested putting mortar in the channel of each post behind the panel to lock the panel in place, so I did some of that too. Pretty happy with the final result – I’m liking the angled panels at each change of height. The missing panels…Continue Reading “Shed retaining wall complete!”
Final concrete pour(!) for the retaining walls this morning went really well. I spent a lot more time putting up the formwork, reinforcing and bracing it, than I had before – ended up with the first sheets stitched together, propped up on little ‘legs’ to the right height, and lined with builders’ plastic, then put in a second layer behind those sheets and screwed to the first for extra strength. The whole thing then got propped up in the trench with handy blocks of concrete…Continue Reading “Final retaining wall pour”
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”
Poured the concrete for the house retaining wall on Wednesday – went reasonably smoothly, except for the operator not really getting the concept of “a bit more concrete slowly, please” and throwing concrete around with complete abandon. So we ended up with some largish blobs of concrete not inside the form. Spent today removing the formwork. I’d expected this to be a bit easier than it was, but the plywood was tightly wedged between the concrete and the sides of the trench in a lot…Continue Reading “House retaining wall – pour and un-forming”
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!”