There aren't many pictures, are there?

I realise that there aren't many pictures, and of course that's because neither Michael nor I have put up any of the photographs we've been taking on our increasingly frequent visits up to the block... which is a long way of saying that I'm about to up-load some photographs to show you how things have progressed during the last few months. This translates into an explanation of how we've been spending TENS of THOUSANDS of dollars!


First off, the road, which back in March looked like this...





... and by the end of August looked like this, very handsome, having been properly engineered with culverts underneath at crucial points to give water somewhere to go instead of ruining the surface (you can just see the white ends of the pipes in the photo), and having been compacted and covered with a good thick layer of gravel.

When we last posted photographs we'd also got started on the house pad (when I say 'we', I do of course mean 'John Lacey' and his merry men, since my awesome skills don't yet extend to driving an excavator.

In January the back wall of the semi-excavated pad looked like this: a rough, almost vertical wall showing marks where the excavator had bitten through it. It wasn't 'battened back' so the surface was still loose and crumbly.

Looking along the house pad from the top of the road, this was the view: a basic platform without any shaping or drainage channels.

By March John had begun to shape the back of the pad (this time the shot is taken from just in front of the tree fern you can see in the previous picture, looking back towards the top of the road), putting in slopes and channels to direct run-off water coming down the hill away from the house.


Now the back wall looks like this: it has been well and truly battened back and now has two 'benches' in it i.e. platforms that break up the slope, making it more stable. Initially we built it with only one batten and a 45 degree angle to the slope, but the geotech report came back recommending a 43 degree slope and two battens, so we took out our wallets and called John up again...

As you can see, the digger had a lot of fun going round in circles moving mud, clay, rocks and tree trunks! This photo was taken from where Michael was standing in the previous picture.






And this is a close-up shot of one of the battened slopes, showing the banded colouring of the layered

clay/Argillite.