re-vegetation works

After having relocated all the fruit trees due to ongoing earthworks, Tina has planted her pumpkin patch and we have started work on revegetating the embankment behind the house. There are quite few ferns popping up around the place so I intend to transplant some of these as well.

the local reptiles

Well we always new they were there everyone has told how many there are, how big they are and how they can just take you off into the rain forest but we finally saw our first  snake today. Good news though he is a friendly one just a common Python a bit over 2metre long. Now they tell me the more of those that are around the less of the nasty ones that are there. This time of year there are plenty of them around as they have started cutting sugar cane and that’s where lots of them live.

Let it rain in Tully

This week’s goal was to deliver and install the rain water tank. As their truck is too big to get up the hill and past the house to where we wanted it, Tina arranged to borrow the truck form work and we picked it up ourselves and drove it to site. Now after much reassurance form the supplier who assures us they just tip them off the truck we lined it up joined a rope to the tank with the tractor and under Tina’s careful driving skills pulled it off the truck nearly into place. Only problem was the outlets were not line dup correctly so we had to spin it around, no easy feat. But ath the end of the day there it was in place fully connected, so just need it to rain in Tully. ( that shouldn’t take too long)

Here comes the power

The jobs are just getting completed so fast it is hard to keep track we have laid the power cable from the workshop underground to the house and already engaged an electrician who his making up the 2 switchboards required and coming to site soon to install them. All we need next is Ergon to come out and actually put up the poles and cable to get the power there. You would think that working at Ergon would give me some pull to get it done faster, but I think it may be the opposite.
(sorry about the photos blogger has gone back to not rotating them again)

We have gutters

To our great surprise the gutters have arrived and 3^rd time lucky they are correct. A couple of hairy moments to get them on the roof but they are in and storm water down pipes are finally connected now all we need is a tank. We are pretty happy to have ended up with 12m+ one piece gutters (no joins) Chris has come back and levelled of the site pad and placed some rubble over the top, well except for the section that the water and septic pipes have not been laid yet

And then there was light - through the windows

The trenching for the stormwater is also done, we have completed this up to 90%......... we are still waiting on the gutters, third time luck hey QLDS.

With all the physical work of digging we decided we needed a rest….. so we installed our 1^st window, we chose the bathroom for this, for 2 reasons, if we can ever get a plumber to come out he see without artificial and can start work, and it definitely sheds some light into that end of the house. Today we knocked off 5 mins early J

 
One window in, but wait it needs to come out again, we have finally worked out the window installation design so we need to take it out to make a slight adjustment. We are adding an angle iron bar across the top of them all to fill in the profile gap to ensure no water can leak in under any circumstances. So 2 windows now completed

A Trenching we will go

 

Finally the sun has burned through the clouds and we have had a sunny week so away with the trenching Chris goes. We have trenching for the electrical cables (house to workshop down the middle of the driveway) for this we needed another new tool! A trenching shovel, and after a day shovelling I guess I can see why we needed one, so many different tools, it makes some many jobs easier.

Room Room Room

Well another weekend of rain, so no trenching to be done again. We have purchased the materials to build the internal walls so we make that our goal for the weekend. It is quite easy and doesn’t take a lot of effort compared to other jobs we have done in the past.

So an easy day on Saturday with 3 walls completed. We now have a bathroom laundry, bedroom 2 & the study. We were really impressed at how big each room turned out.

 We plant our latest fruit tree, an Abui which is a native of the Amazon region. It tastes like caramel custard but is not grown commercially as it does not travel, another addition to our ever going orchard.