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.