The house wot Juffy built
The day of the big tank, the big hole, the big tank in the big hole and then both disappeared. Gary from ATU Wastewater rocked up nice and early, with his 8t excavator and driver in tow – when I got on site they’d already ripped out a tree that was in the way, marked out the hole and had just about started digging. I’d been worried about hitting rock on this dig – the soil test guys said they’d hit rock at ~1.6m where…Continue Reading “ATU Installation day”
Site visit with the ATU installer earlier in the week, which lead to some more tree-pruning so the excavator had enough vertical clearance to get the tank in where I wanted it. The other fun bit of information was “I need to put 6,000L of water into it as soon as it’s installed” – if it rains heavily after installation, runoff fills the hole around the tank and the tank floats out of the ground. This is bad. The only problem with this is my…Continue Reading “ATU preparation”
At long last, the council has decided that I’m actually allowed to build this thing. Now to work out how… 🙂
After a bit of back and forth with the window people (to get them to pony up some official-looking stats on their window performance), I have my efficiency rating: Better than I expected – my gut feel had been somewhere in the 8.5 range, mainly because of the size of the glass in the living room, the west-facing aspect of some of that big frame, and the east-facing narrow windows in the bedrooms. I think if I’d done this assessment earlier in the process (instead…Continue Reading “Energy Efficiency rating”
Much less painful than the electricity – put in application, approved 2 days later, installed 12 days after that.
What with all the delays with engineering etc, I’d decided to get moving on order and approvals for the ATU and water tank – I figured the ATU in particular would take aaaaages, because the supplier would take their customary 30 days to do stuff, and the council would take their customary 30 days to do stuff, and suddenly I’d be waiting on the ATU approval to get building approval. Side note: I had to have the ATU approved by the council health people as…Continue Reading “Fun with tanks”
Hyuk hyuk. A friend of mine dropped a massive old marri tree a few years ago, with plans to slab it out for their own use. That plan fell through, and they offered me the log for the price of slabbing it. Contacted a local milling guy and we teed it up for today. Darren rocked up with his Lucas mill, which is a very shiny piece of kit – in slabbing mode it’s a whopping great engine with a 1.2m chainsaw bar on it,…Continue Reading “Marri me….or not.”
That time when everything grows 5x faster. Maintenance visit to the block – elderly neighbour on the downhill side asked if I could trim my trees back from their overhead electricity supply cable, so I borrowed a pole saw and did mine and theirs. Neighbour on the uphill side (who’s moving to the back of beyond) offloaded his mowers to me, so I tried out the working one. Mowing 30cm grass isn’t a lot of fun, particularly when you have to stop and empty the…Continue Reading “Ahh, spring”
Some lucky people don’t need to get planning approval, but I needed it for a couple of reasons: You always need to get planning approval for building in areas with high bushfire risk, and To fit my slightly-less-than-gigantic shed on the block, I needed a couple of retaining walls close to the boundaries. The shed has a couple of slightly….unique features. I wanted an extra wet room, because there’s nothing worse than getting completely covered in sawdust, and then…needing to visit the bathroom. So….my shed…Continue Reading “Planning application, and some more about sheds”
There’s some sort of cliche about man needing a shed, and this one certainly does. My old place had a 8x12m shed, typical rural metal shed with high walls and absolutely no insulation. I found it was pretty unusable for about 3 months of the year after midday, as the whole thing became a hotbox and I’d just sweat all over my tools. My shiny new BAL restrictions meant I wanted to put the shed in front of the house, but the local planning scheme…Continue Reading “Meanwhile, the shed…”