Ayres Rocks

I was on the block over the weekend getting some labouring work done for the plumber. The slab looks great and we’ve been so lucky with the weather with mainly overcast days and a fair amount of rain spread across the day. Here’s hoping those curing conditions give us the strongest slab possible.

The plumber has been hard at it connecting the drains to the underfloor plumbing. The amount of fall by the time he’s wrapped the pipe around the slab and started heading it out to the septic tank is around 1.8 metres. That’s some major site excavations. With some dumb luck he has not found any huge lumps of rock, instead being able to bash his way through with a jackhammer. That works out cheaper for us than a rock breaking excavator for sure but will still blow out his bill somewhat.

Never mind though, we’d had visions of being $10 000 poorer after the site cut revealed those huge lumps of rock so the $3000 or so bill resulting from that is a more pleasant result.

Today we poured the slab. 56 cubic metres of concrete took less than 6 hours to pour and finish. Check out the photos of the pour on our flickr account.

Our intentions are now to let the slab slowly cure by keeping it as wet as possible over the next 7 days which largely will be done by the rain that has been forecast. We will then let it sit at least 4 weeks to reach maximum strength before we start on the walls. Until then we are going to start on the power room so we have a secure place to store tools on site.

This morning I was on the block to clear the pasture from where the plumber needs to sink the septic and soakage trenches. The pad was complete and the engineers site report was attached to one of the pegs. The engineer has specified we require no extra mesh or concrete, classifying the site as complying with the requirements of a full cut. After the hassles with all that rock this is the best outcome possible for us.

Tomorrow morning I am meeting with the plumber on site to discuss layout, septic, soakage and drain placements. He expects to be done within a couple of days which means we should with some luck have the slab curing away sometime early into next week.

More photos of the progress can be found on the flickr account.

Concretor rang me around Thursday 11/11 to let me know he’d used the water in the tank and needed it replenished. Problem is he was actually meant to start on the 15/11. It took me a couple of seconds to come to the conclusion this was much better than him ringing and letting me know he would be a week or more late.

Photos of his progress so far are on the flickr account.

It was way too wet to get the trailer on to the block today to deliver the tank. Instead we marked out the driveway by slashing the pasture. We also organised the farmer leasing our land to install some gates and fence off the woodlot so he can let his sheep into the paddock to chew down the pasture before the fire season proper starts.

The neighbour with all the cool toys will be making the driveway this week.  All up there is some 60 tonnes of rubble that he will bring on to site to form 70 metres of driveway. It’s not a cheap exercise but a necessary one – if my 4WD struggles to get in and out of the site it’s a fair bet the trucks carrying building materials will have no chance should it rain.

The rock was smashed out of the cut site and the decision was made to use a cut and fill based on the depth of the rock and the repercussions for the plumber and concretor. Check out the size of some of the slabs in the flickr account, link to that is at the right of page under “Photos”.

This weekend we will be delivering a 5000 litre tank and filling it with rainwater for the plumber and concretor to use during their works on the site.  The tank will later become one of the those used to hold water off the roof space as it is transfered to the holding tank further up the hill.

We will also mark out the driveway for our neighbour to construct for us to get trucks and other vehicles safely into the site. The pasture has grown out of control with the hint of warm weather, which hides all the rocks and leaves us with no choice but to construct a proper path into the site.

I haven’t had time to scratch the proverbial let alone sit and write about what has been happening so far.

This update will be quick fire since we did not do much of the work ourselves. At the start of October we measured up the build area and set out the cut for the house and the areas for the topsoil and subsoil spoil. Around October 8th our neighbour started on the earthworks for the building site, cutting as much of the site as he could.

What he did find was an enormous lump of rock and several smaller ones that prevented him making a clean and full cut to the site. We have some photos of the cut area up on the flickr account here. The rock is huge but the camera doesn’t distinguish it well from the soil in the background, but trust us as we walked around it and lamented its being, it is massive.

That rock has since been removed and we will get up there and get some more photos of the finished cut this weekend, weather permitting. As I mentioned, only a quickfire update but stay tuned – the plumber and concreter are communicating between themselves and it looks like we’ll have a slab ready to build on in about 4 weeks.