The house wot Juffy built
Spent the morning trimming most of the ‘pads’ between the trenches down to the correct height (the sand pad varied in height by 20-30mm, and I’d – wisely? – taken a low point as my baseline) before these two blokes invaded the block and undid most of my good work: Plumbing pre-lay nearly fell in a hole straight away, when we discovered that I’d sent them an old copy of the plans before Neve had worked her magic on the bathroom – so all of…Continue Reading “The invasion of the plumbers”
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”
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”
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”
More back and forth with the owner. The agent had an interesting idea – agree on the purchase price, the owner gets an official quote from Western Power for a connection, and rebate that off the price. Seems fair enough. Let’s sign some paperwork.
Back after a lovely road trip taking the scenic route to Adelaide, camping out of the back of my ute without many cares in the world. If you haven’t been to Cape Le Grand NP, I highly recommend it. More negotiations with the owner, and we’d pretty much nailed down a price. The agent had promised me all services (except deep sewerage, because this is the hills) were available, and I could take power off the pole on the boundary between the two blocks. Sounds…Continue Reading “Back to negotiations…”