Onsite Amenities

For any construction, you are required to have onsite amenities. So today I thought I would do the right thing and recycle some of the old fence into a toilet block. My plan is to first construct the building and then fit it out with all the necessaries. As you can see, I have mostly completed the building. I need a back wall and some louvers for the front. The door, which is solid wood, came from inside the back flat.

Fence and Gate Complete

Well, after two long weekends, I have finally finished the 36m of fence and gate. I tried to conceal the gate from the park side - makes the place a little mysterious. I think the pictures say it all...

Council

We seem to have quite a responsive, efficient council at Freshwater. First, they processed our DA in five weeks. Then, Graham found people at the playground were using our outside tap to fill water bottles. He rang council to suggest they install a bubbler in the park. Lo and behold, this weekend there was a brand new bubbler!

New Fence

Last week, I ordered 35m of 1.8m high paling fence. Last weekend, I managed to put up most of it. Enough to secure the property.

The old fence posts that were concreted in were easily removed using my crane. I hooked up the posts and up came they came complete with a bulb of concrete. Wack, wack with the sledge hammer and the concrete fell off. I love my crane.

For the posts, I needed concrete. I didn't have a mixer, and didn't want to rent or buy one, so I invented one - kind of. I used a old brew kit plastic barrel. It seemed to work fairly well after I got the hang of it. I filled it up with the ingredients and just rolled it around the yard - probably only for a couple of minutes. It made around 10 or so litres of concrete per batch.

Wildlife

While Graham was clearing out the oleanders at the back of the garden, he found several tiny brown snakes or legless lizards, about 10cm long. From the kitchen window we often see a brushtail possum curled up asleep in a tree in the park. There are wattlebirds in our garden, and crested pigeons in the park. And while he was clearing an overgrown woodpile, Graham found this frog.

Recycle bricks

While removing the oleanders, I encountered heaps of rubble and old bricks. Today I took them to the Kimbriki recycle centre ($11 per trailer load). I was kicking myself and feeling rather silly for forgetting my broom. I spent a good ten minutes trying to use my gloves and shoes to clean the bottom of the trailer. Just as I was about to drive off, another guy pulled up with a ute load of bricks - he was using his bare hands to unload. I didn't feel so stupid anymore, at least I remembered my gloves.

Off to the tip with green waste

I took the day off to ferry the oleanders off to the Kimbriki recycle station. It is 18 km away, but they take some stuff for free. In order to qualify, I needed to take the cage off my trailer and prove that I was a local resident. I was a bit apprehensive about the stumps (see picture below) and thought they may charge me the full rate ($145 a ton), but fortunately they didn’t so I’m happy. While in the queue, some guy was having an argument – obviously he thought he should not be charge the full rate. The attendant kept on pointing to the two axels on his trailer and on the price guide. Why do people bother arguing? I was next and the guy was obviously in a foul mood.

Crane

A couple of months ago, I signed up for an artistic welding course in order to learn how to weld. I figured that this may be necessary in building a house. This weekend was my first opportunity to try out my new found skills. This came about during the week when I figured I needed a crane. My immediate need was simply to get stumps on and off my trailer. It seems like I'd probably use it for other things as well. So I mail ordered 900kg swivel crane, it arrived the next day. These cranes are designed to be mounted on the back of trucks, but I wanted mine to be free standing. So I made my own crane base. I opted for a T style base with the bottom of the T to be in tension to be held down either with weights or ties.

My first use was not actually to load the stumps on to the trailer. It was to hoist really heavy plants over the fence. You can see by the pictures that I mounted the crane on top of the trailer cage and positioned the trailer next to the fence. It worked a treat! There was a bit of noise when the plant swung over the fence as tension swapped with compression, but every thing seemed to be fine. I ended up moving 24 of these 75litre grow bags.

Gardening

We finally got access to our property about three weeks ago. The first order of work is getting rid of the shrubbery out the back.

Realising that this is a one off task, I didn't want to spend too much money. I stuck with basic tools. A spade, pick axe, pruning saws and a block splitter. The block splitter rocks! Due to its weight and wide angle cutting edge, it was perfect for the dirt encrusted roots.

To get the stump out, I simply dug around the trunk bundle as close as possible, removing dirt and cutting roots. I found that the amount of effort required to remove the stump exponentially increased with the size of the oleander.

A bit of background

Back in April last year, we bought a house at Freshwater (formerly Harbord). It's solid enough, but not very attractive and doesn't take advantage of its site. We wanted to build our own house: well, I wanted to design a house and Graham wants to do the actual building.

The builder and architect took ages to get the documentation ready, and then we had to do a lot ourselves, but then it went through the DA process in only five weeks!

We recently gave the tenants notice, and when the back flat became vacant we were able to start clearing out the back yard.