The shape of things to come?

First of all, Merry Christmas! It hardly seems possible that Christmas has been and gone: it zoomed past at top speed, and here we are, contemplating New Year. Ironically Michael and I had thought we'd got a dinner date at a lovely local Italian restaurant all lined up, and that Patrick might be at home baby-sitting for want of a social life in Coffs Harbour... silly us. The New Year's Eve dinner has fallen through and Patrick suddenly has a social life! So I shall be cooking for Michael and Ella at home, and then I think Michael and I will luxuriate in being able to watch some movies that neither of our offspring would appreciate. On the basis that I'm not posting regularly to this blog at the moment, I guess I'd better wish you all a Happy New Year too!

Anyway, my 'purpose' in writing today was to amuse you with our water antics over Christmas. We were not unnaturally perturbed when, at 5pm on Christmas Eve, Ella came to me and said, 'Mummy, I turned my tap on and no water came out'. Our first thought was that the fuse on the pump system must have blown - usually 'no water coming out of the tap' is a result of a power-outage, although in this case all the lights and appliances were still working. Mysteriously, though, all was well in the fuse box which meant that, no! wait! we must have RUN OUT OF WATER!

I should explain our system at this point. We, like many Australians, rely on water pumped up from a bore in the garden. In our case, as we have no worked out, the bore water must be pumped up from the ground and into a large above-ground holding tank (find extension cable; lead extension cable many metres from nearest power point across lawn to bore; ferret around under bore lid to find plug and plug into extension cable; switch on and wait for HOURS until the above-ground holding tank is filled). The water is then moved to an underground tank beneath our carport (turn off bore pump; disconnect extension cable and take back into the office; push plug back under lid of the bore; turn on correct valve - four to choose from! - and push end of hose into correct hole in piece of plastic pipe near the downpipes at one end of the car port; wait HOURS for the gravity-fed trickle of water to provide you with enough water in the underground tank that the above-ground pump that circulates the water through the house can work....).

I should also explain the involvement of our landlord who has previously said that we shouldn't worry about the water because when he comes over twice a week to mow the lawns he'd ensure that the two tanks are kept topped up. So it should have been a simple case of allowing the water in the above-ground tank to trickle into the below-ground tank. Except that there wasn't any water in the above-ground tank. None.

We're reasonably intelligent and resourceful people with a passing understanding of pipes, valves and extension cables so we were able to work things out to this point. Michael, having been brought up here, was also familiar with the idea that once we'd pumped water up and out of the bore into the above-ground holding tank it would be a good idea to aerate it and then allow it to settle so that we weren't then pumping impurities into the underground tank and thence into the house. So we were able to hook up the pump from the bore and get that going, in the hope that while we'd have to flush the toilets with buckets of water taken from the swimming pool we would then have enough water to cater for 12 people sitting down for Christmas dinner the next day. By this time it was 7:30 pm.

The one thing we weren't sure of was the best way to deal with the pump in the office that would take the water from the underground tank, once it was full, and pump it into the house. We'd switched it off because it was making funny noises, and now we weren't sure if, when we switched it on again once the tank was full, it would need 'priming'. So we reluctantly phoned our landlord to ask, thinking that it was much less annoying to be phoned on Christmas Eve than it would be to be phoned on Christmas Day... which is when he broke the news to us, over the phone, that once the water had been pumped up from the bore into the above-ground holding tank it needed a) aerating, b) chlorinating with a cup-ful of granulated pool chlorine, and c) it would need to settle for at least TWO DAYS!

The nett result of this bombshell was that Michael and I, at 7:50pm on Christmas Eve, could be seen racing to our two cars and setting out in opposite directions to the two main supermarkets in Coffs Harbour! I went north to Coles at Moonee Beach, and Michael went south to Woolworths at Park Beach Plaza, in the hope that at least one of them would be open. They both were, so we stocked up on 75litres of spring water and some pool chlorine and came back, chlorinated the water we'd pumped up into the above-ground holding tank, and decided we could now afford to wait until morning for it to have aerated, disinfected and settled enough for us to pump some of it into the underground tank for the house... so although I had a 'pommie shower' (i.e. a flannel wash using warm water from the kettle and a basin of expensive mineral water!), by the time guests rocked up on Christmas Day we could at least flush the toilets! And frankly, we had more than enough drinking water since most people were lubricating their insides with alcohol...

Oh what fun. Naturally, having been through this trauma, we determined to keep an eye on the water supply ourselves, rather than relying on Mark to do it for us, and so we pumped a full tank into the above-ground holding tank, chlorinated it and aerated it and allowed it to settle.

So far, so good. Michael and I went out to see 'The Golden Compass' at the cinema last night, and came back to discover that we'd left the seep hose running on the vegetable garden for hours, with the consequence that we'd almost used up the supply in the underground tank - which wasn't full to begin with. No problem! We'd got all that water in the above-ground holding tank, so we started trickling it into the below-ground tank under the car port, and went to be in the cheery belief that we'd have water when we woke up this morning because by then gravity would have emptied the one tank into the other and all would be well. EXCEPT that Ella had left her tap on in her bathroom last night... so all the water that we were slowly pumping into the tank was trickling out of her tap.

BUGGER!

So we're back on the mineral water and starting all over again!

Lessons learned (which will be valuable once we're on our block and living off the rainwater we collect from our roof):

1. You can never have too much water already disinfected/filtered/aerated or whatever, sitting in your holding tank! Keep it topped up.

2. Put a timer on your hose so that even if you forget to turn the supply off, your vegetables aren't drowning...

3. Fit self-regulating taps on all the basins! After all, how often really have you needed to run a full basin of water? We won't go for the expensive sensor-type taps, but we will go for the pressure-sensitive taps that stop automatically after dispensing a set amount of water.

Well, you live and learn, as they say. Now, about that holding tank...

Taking a look

It's amazing how much of a difference putting a road into our block has made to my understanding of how our proposed house site might 'work'. I'm fine visualising things in three dimensions i.e. anticipating what rooms might look like from a house plan, but I'm not so good when I'm trying to understand what a digger is going to achieve in an afternoon. And boy, do they achieve a lot under John Lacey's capable directions. Admittedly Michael was the one who had to do all the site visits; I just carried on as usual and then Bam! I visited the block and there was a road, as if by magic, and the whole architectural 'logic' of the landscape is now clear to see.

We visited the block on Monday afternoon with John Lacey, Christian (architect), Dave O'Meara (engineer) and Ella (off sick from school but as both Michael and I needed to be at the meeting she had to come too...), to discuss what further earth-moving is necessary to achieve a 'pad' for the house that is workable as far as Christian's design requires it, structurally safe from an engineering point of view, and giving Michael and me as clients what we want. It's very hard to convey a visual impression of the huge cut into the hillside and the road leading up to it by photographs alone, even Michael's clever use of a programme to stitch together panoramic scenes, but here's my best effort:

This panorama is taken from the north-eastern end of the platform. looking south-west. The sea is out beyond the left-hand edge of the picture, and behind the house site, to the right of the picture is the hillside that blocks out the summer sun from the north. The original house plan was for this site, but it was a long, narrow design which would have extended from where I'm standing taking the picture out along the curve of the hillside for almost 80 metres! What is not apparent from the photograph is that the left-hand edge of the house 'pad' is constructed from soil that has been pushed down and outwards from the hillside. This means that approximately half of the depth of the pad, from the left-hand edge that you can see in the picture to half-way across the stretch of red earth, is compacted soil lying on top of what was once a slope. Only the right-hand part of the pad, stretching back into the hillside is actually grounded on rock. Therefore we will be building up to the centreline of the pad, so that the weight of the house is carried over the rocky part of the pad, with only decking and/or terrace lying on the compacted soil - for obvious reasons.

Another consideration is that there is a gully running through the pad, down the hillside. You can just about make out its course on the photograph: a dark line coming down the slope just to the left of that tree whose shadow is being cast across the rear of the pad. In order to cope with the gully we're going to divert the water course above the level of the house site and direct it around the far edge, but we won't be able to build over the gully; instead we may end up situating part of the building (the studio/office, for example) on the other side of the gully and linking it to the main house by a covered walkway. Christian will be thinking about drawing up plans #3 once we've had the finished pad surveyed in the next week or so, and I think we're looking at either a building that consists of two parts linked as described, or possibly one above the other, terraced up the slope.

Something we have established is that we cannot place a long, thin swimming pool across the front of the pad for the same reason that we can't build the house right up to the edge: without very expensive reinforcement work, the compacted soil won't take the weight of a pool filled with water, so instead we're looking to run a pool sideways in relation to the house, roughly where I'm standing to take the photograph.

It's all a bit difficult to envisage unless you've already seen the plans, you went to the meeting and you've stood on the site I suppose! But soon we'll be able to put up drawings for you to have a look at, and hopefully it will all become clearer... Now onto my next problem, which is how much it will all cost, closely followed by trying to 'size' a solar electricity system properly! No rest for the wicked.

Critters

Not exactly on topic, I know, but I thought I post some pictures of some of the animals that we run into at the moment on the bush block we are renting for the English who regard scavenging seagulls and drunk students as exotic wildlife!

A nest of young native Welcome Swallows who have taken residence by our front door

Our friendly Pretty Faced Wallaby who has taken to grazing under our clothes line.

Yes, that is Sara's neck! This is one of the hundreds of frogs that is keeping us awake at night at the moment. I fished this little bugger out of our pool last night. They make far more noise than any Bristol Student's party I've experienced!

Diggers ...

It's been a long time coming, but at long last a posting on progress at "The Lookout", Lot 31 North Boambee Road, Coffs Harbour. Those who've been following the story know of our purchase of 10 acres just 4 kilometres South of Coffs Harbour CBD. 

 

Click on map to view detailed map of the area

 

Those who've been paying attention heard of us needing to move the building site for our home due to "land slippage" problems as advise by a local Geotech firm. The new position was to be quite a small footprint on a rather steep part of the block very near the border of the block overlooking our neighbour's house. Erm ... Less than ideal! Such is life, we accepted the need and moved on to engage a local earthmoving firm (John Lacey Earthmoving) to cut a good road (as distinct from a steep track that serviced the site previously) to the new building site. We rolled up to the site with John to lay out what we wanted to do and he in no uncertain terms questioned the expertise of the Geotech firm and persuaded us to have a look at the ground after the new road had cut through our preferred site and see if we really wanted to pursue what would have been a very expensive and complicated build. To cut a long story short, our preferred site is fine and we have confirmed this with a local civil engineers - David O'Meara (before anyone thinks we are heading off half cocked!). We are now very close to having a large platform carved into our site and a nice gently inclined 4 metre road leading to the site. We might have even had the earthworks complete if we hadn't had about 12 inches of rain over the last week! Tomorrow we are having a site visit with our architect, Christian Fisher, John and David to identify next steps.

I've spent some time stitching some photo's together into some rough panorama's to give you an idea of what's happening on the site ...

 Looking up to the building site from the bottom of the block:

 

Stitched panorama looking out to sea about 20 metres below building site:

View to the road from the building site:

A stitched panorama (at this stage) of the building platform: