Things are arriving!

Things have started arriving at the site which is very exciting. It finally seems like we are actually building a house! The foundations for the garage are poured and the bricks have been delivered. The same day, the first floor trusses arrived so we had 2 trucks at once. We thought we might have some problems with deliveries due to the location of our block (dirt road, narrow, etc) but crane trucks seem to cope OK. We then had our tanks arrive; 3 x 20,000L monstrosities! Getting these off the truck was a major effort. I wasn't there of course but Darren tells me it was hard work. The poor delivery guys had come from Yass in NSW and had spent most of the day lost in the hills before arriving and seemingly having little idea of how to actually get the tanks off the truck! Anyway, we have managed to get them into position kind of with the help of our excavator man.

The upper retaining wall is finished and the stump holes have been dug in the last few days. We had to dig down to clay which ended up being around 3 metres in most spots as the house site is on old fill. We will fill them with some concrete before putting in the stumps themselves. Our building inspector has gone on holidays but he is going to come back to inspect our holes on Monday so we can keep going. That is nice of him I think.

Well, onward we go. It is very exciting!!

Here is the top retainer wall finished.

Here you can see the main house site with the floor trusses in the background and two of our tanks unloaded. These will need to be moved back into the right rear corner which will be the back of the house. These two will fill off our main house and will be our water supply.

This is a view of the lower level garage site with our bricks delivered. This tank will fill off this roof and will be kept for fire use. We have to have 10,000 litres on site at all times specifically for fighting fires. It has to have all the right fittings for the fire trucks etc. They can use it to fight any fire in the area.

We have had heaps of rain over the Christmas weeks and this is a photo of the little creek that cuts the corner on our land. Isn't it cute!

Retaining walls

We have begun building our first retaining wall and have had a lot of excavation done in the past week. I am amazed at the colour of the soil we are digging out - a rich red which I have seen on the farms at Monbulk but didn't expect here. Hopefully it will grow a nice vegie patch one day!

Here are the latest photos!

This is where our lower level garage will go. All this has to be retained with big L-shaped steel rods going through the trench and up the wall between the bricks. The trench and the wall cavity is then filled with concrete.

This is the big retaining wall along the top of the land. The steel posts go up to 2m into the ground!

The same wall at the highest point. This is the corner where the upper garage will be. The area behing the wall will be backfilled and tree ferns will stay where they are.

Work begins but still no money

I'm posting some photos of our block as it is now. We have lopped about 12 trees which Darren has been busily cutting up and moving around. (Yes, we had permission!). We have some big Blackwood logs which we are going to let dry out and eventually get milled into boards. We hope to use them on the staircase inside as a feature. We've still got some Japanese cedar trees to cut down later on and we'll probably use them to build a rustic ranch style fence along the street, leave some bark on them etc. It is a nice thing to reuse some of the old trees, gives the place some character I think.

Progress has been slow. We are still waiting on our new finance and are totally skint at present, living on credit. I phoned the solicitor who is handling the settlement with our old bank only to find out that they (the bank) have lost our title, hence the delays. Oh well, more patience required!!! Darren has finished up other work and is ready to devote himself full time to building our house. You may wonder how we can afford this but we have just factored living expenses into our building costs. Yes, we are borrowing money to live while we build but it is still much cheaper than if Darren worked and we paid another builder to build for us. Darren has also been able to work off much of our rent which is a big help. Once we sell our Venus Bay house, we will be fine. Hopefully over the summer this will happen. Please pray!!

Yesterday we hired a guy with a bigger excavator and started digging out around the top cut on the property. Holes were drilled and next week Darren is building a huge retaining wall with steel supports and sleepers. This will stop the cut edge from falling on our house in the future!!! This is our first step and then we will start stumps. Hopefully our money will come through and we can start purchasing more materials next week too.

Well, on we go, here are some photos, Jodie.

This is the flat part where we will build the house. There is a cut up to the right and a cut down to the left.

This is looking up the driveway to the clear space for the house, just a bit further away. You can see our little shack on the left up the top. If you can, imagine looking up at.........

Yes, this is the front of our house!!!

Darren's new toy!!

Amber on some of our logs (in a Batman suit).

Here is a site plan, the photos above are taken from the right hand side of this map looking up at the house and garage.

Our new blog

Welcome to our blog. We have set up this page to share our news with our family and friends as we go about building our house in the hills. It is almost 3 years to the day that we signed the contract of sale on this land. It has been a slow and sometimes frustrating journey towards puttting in that first stump but it is almost about to happen. We have renovated and sold our old home, moved into three different rentals, moved the kids to a new area and a new school, put in masses of paperwork including planning applications, building applications, septic applications, wildfire management reports, tree reports, house plans, site plans, energy ratings, soil reports, engineering reports, insurance applications and finance applications. We have waited an awful lot, learnt an awful lot and finally we are here. Our building permit should be issued tomorrow, our extra finance should come through this week and we can start!
The first job is to build some retaining walls as our building area is bordered by some large cuts in the land. We have bought our own bobcat to do our clearing and some excavating. We decided it would be more cost efficient to have our own and we can sell it at the end of the project if we need to. I will post some photos of the block soon. Stay tuned for the exciting news that we have put in those stumps! Love Jodie.