We have a floor and it's red!

Here is our floor being built. The timber is red as it is specially treated to repel termites. It looks very pretty!! The sheets on the right are the chipboard floor which Jake and Ben are helping to put on.
Darren wants to shoot me?????

Our handsome helpers, Ben and Jake.

Today, the site is being sprayed for termites and the floor will then be finished. Next, we start walls. Stay tuned.

PS Thanks Teresa for your comments. Hopefully it won't be long till you're doing the same as us.

You guys can make comments!

Hey, do you realise you can leave comments on our blog? Just click on the words "0 Comments" or whatever the count is, at the bottom of each post. Then you can write us a message! Thanks Jo for being the first to comment! Love Jodie.

Our garage

Our garage is coming along nicely as you can see from these photos. This will be Darren's workshop and where he will keep his van. I will have a smaller garage up on the main house level. Darren is very excited with the size of his "shed".

This photo is looking up the driveway to where the main house will be with the garage on the left on the lower level. Darren has plans to turn the slope in front of the garage (where the tree fern is at the top) into a conifer garden.

This pic is taken from above the retaining walls. All the stumps are now in and the garage is on the left in the background.

We have also decided to downsize the upper storey of the house. It was just too big! We are now having 4 bedrooms upstairs for the kids as well as a bathroom (with 2 showers) and a communal closet. Downstairs will be our bedroom and a guest room. So it is now 6 bedrooms instead of 8 which was a bit ridiculous. Jake and Ben will have their own room and the others will share for now. The younger ones don't like being on their own anyway and we can always use the guest room or other spaces for a bedroom later on if we need to. We still have 2 living areas plus a huge rumpus room downstairs.

That is the news for now. We should be able to start the floor very soon. Love to all, Jodie.

PS, our "baby" Amber starts school tomorrow!

Progress

Stumps are in, well first lot anyway, we had to leave some so we could have an area for the concrete trucks to come in. We need about 20 more but most are in. Bricklayer started today, very exciting to see walls going up. Also Darren has levelled the first tank and put it in place so we could get some water delivered. We will need it for bricking as well as drinking later on.

This is our little shed. It came with a BBQ, a fridge, microwave and power so it is very handy. To the left is a nice shady area where we can sit and watch the men work!!!

The first wall!

Yay, the stumps go in.

Today we put our first stump into the ground. The holes had been dug, filled with concrete and as we speak Darren and Luke are levelling all the stumps into the holes. Here are some photos.

The stump holes.

Filling up the barrows.

Emptying the barrows, this went on for about 40 minutes.

The first stump going in.

Nicky and Lucas watching from the shade.

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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.