The house wot Juffy built
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!”
Another fun day putting the posts in place to be concreted. Thankfully had some help for this, so I could mostly stay in the trench while my helper ran around fetching posts, spacers and bluemetal. The technique recommended by the wall manufacturer worked really well, with a top & bottom spacer (the top one with notches to sit on the top of each post) to keep the posts aligned with each other. I made the spacers out of structural pine, which is wildly overkill for…Continue Reading “Retaining wall: propping”
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”
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”
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”
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”
With the excavator still around thanks to the long weekend, I figured it’d be a good chance to get the sand pad prepped for my main water tank. Coincidentally, my sister had made a wild claim that she really wanted to learn to use a compactor – and I wasn’t going to pass up a willing helper or two. Me, K and dad gathered up the exxy, a compactor and the pile of sand I had delivered last week, and we had a right old…Continue Reading “Water tank prep”
Space in the milling guy’s solar kiln opened up, so I had to move the huge stack of timber from where we milled it to his place. Hired the excavator again to haul the 200+kg pieces of timber into the trailer, couple of runs and it was all moved. Hard day’s work with the help of dad, his trailer and his indestructible 80-series ‘cruiser.
Hard day at the office. Western Power put the green dome in the inconvenient corner (albeit for good reasons), on the wrong side of my future temporary crossover. Rather than hire an excavator just to dig a short trench under where the crossover will go, and get a sparky out just to put a cable in with nowhere to go until I get the rest of the pad laid out, I figured I’d do this one by hand and put in an empty pipe for…Continue Reading “Diggy diggy trenchy”