25th - 30th January 2010

This was the week Dave's work began in earnest, as he was given the task of digging the trench for the foundation wall of the garage while the proper mate, Richard, did the same for the house. It was hot and sunny all week and for a while I think the thought of a return to a cosy desk and some IT problems may have seemed quite attractive to Dave. But anyway, he survived and with Neil the builder following his two charges along the trenches to build its boxing, the job was done amazingly quickly.

Monday (yes even Anniversary Day didn't stop them) Let the battle commence.

Not a bad day's work for an old'un.

Tuesday - more trench,

some lovely woodwork,

and lots of polystyrene


Wednesday - a smile as the garage trench is finished


Meanwhile, just to keep myself amused, I started to sort the flaxes around the veggie patch - a bit of gentle weeding, a lot of cardboard boxes and some of last week's grass clippings should sort them out. Almost all have survived thus far which is very promising.

By Thursday, the foundation trench was just about done and
it was all looking so good until.....


Friday, when a whole group of plumbers came and turned the place into chaos.

22nd January 2010

Well, yesterday had been an action day and today was a thinking day, when the clever stuff was to be done. As in marking out the precise position and height of the foundation.






By the end of the day, it was mainly done, fingers crossed that the hares dont visit and rearrange the string.

Oh yes and the veggie patch was now full of soil...

... well almost.

21st January 2010

The first day of real action and what a lot was going on.

The plan was to remove the topsoil from the house site and add it to the veggie patch. To do this, the existing veggie patch topsoil had to be removed, and some of the underlying sand underneath removed. This was to be used in the foundations.


It seemed to keep a lot of people very busy all day


And moved a large amount of earth


And of course we needed materials for the foundations

But at the end of the day, we had a veggie patch with lots of new topsoil (and far fewer gorse bushes we hope) ......
and a nice flat compacted sand building site.

20th January 2010

A very exciting day with lots of firsts and lasts.
We obtained our building consent last week and were expecting to meet our builder on site at lunchtime to discuss when he would be available to start. But he arrived first thing and was all ready to go and had arranged for someone to dig out the house site early tomorrow morning. Yay!
And we had a second visitor before 9am, the electricity inspector who wanted to find out if our connection had been made - this was due over a week ago, but still no progress. Hopefully he will chase them up now, especially as the builder will be starting tomorrow.
It was definitely a mowing day - this had always been planned but now it was more important as we needed to mow the house site area so the topsoil could be removed tomorrow. And so this should be the last time I was able to mow the living room or the bedroom or the garage! But it did look rather smart when it was done.

And it was the first time I mowed part of the future orchard, and what a jungle it had become. We are planning to use the topsoil that is removed from the house site for the fruit trees and the veggie patch so I had to mow both these places so they were ready for the digger tomorrow.
And as we now have a water supply, it was the last time we will need to water the trees with buckets....

and the first time we could water them by hose. Lots of yays for that!

It was also the first time we noticed one of our natives in flower - one of the akeakes. This is particularly good news as these trees had been struggling more than most a few months back.

And first prize in the growth department had to go to one of the gums on the southern boundary which is now much taller than me. And a very pretty tree it is too.

So now let the real action commence...

8 and 13 January 2010

Dave nipped up to the section on Friday with the sparky to connect the electric cable to a new meter box.

And then it was back to our Wednesday routine to check everything had survived its Xmas holiday. We knew the weather had been terrible so the plants should not have dried out too much and, sure enough, everything seemed to be thriving. Some more than most of course, mainly the blackberries, which now had some ripe fruit....

... and fennel, which was now taller than Dave and had very tough stems.


But we had a new blade for the trimmer and it was put to good use.

One mystery was the completely empty pond - and the culprit was soon found - a dead hedgehog in the bottom which must have fallen in and made an almighty effort to escape. It had succeeded in ripping the plastic liner in a gazillion places. Hopefully nothing that some sticking tape cant fix - we shall see!