Terracing

Pete the digger driver has been here all weekend preparing our garden! The slope has been divided into terraces - three at the moment - with a rocked back wall. Where there was once a single slope which was very steep and we couldn't figure out how to plant it, we now have wide flat spaces which we can sow with grass, rocked back walls to keep things stable, and gentler slopes that we can plant up with shrubs and trees.


































From below the house this is what it looks like so far: the beginnings of a zig-zag of what will be grass, travelling down the hill. I have a vision of the garden as it flows downwards... shrubs, trees, ground cover plants... it might take a bit of time to grow, though! First we have to put weed matting down, and plant through it, and wait for the whole thing to knit together.

Doing the groundwork

Life on the block has been a little frustrating recently because our builder is over-committed and consequently we haven't seen much in the way of building going on for the last couple of weeks. The problem started with the bad weather at the beginning of the month which meant it was difficult to get workers and trucks up here so none of the material for building the decks or plasterboarding the house has yet arrived, and the problem was compounded for a while because the plasterers couldn't start until the cool room went in.

As you know, the cool room (complete with commercial glass doors into the dining area) is close to dearest husband's heart... well here it is, in all its glory, albeit before the aforementioned doors have gone in.





















The 'box' effectively came in pre-assembled, just requiring seals and internal fittings. Part of the studwork in the wall between the pantry and the dining area had to be removed so that the cool room could just slide in!





















After a couple of days' work the unit was pushed into position





















The door into the cool room features a manually operated bell so that if someone got stuck on the inside they can ring for help - mind you, the door doesn't lock so all they'd need to do is pull hard!





















That is pretty much the only work that has gone on inside the house unless you count a bit of tidying up of joinery and putting down the bottom runners for the sliding wardrobe doors. Outside we did get a day of rendering (viz. the planter boxes, one of which is shown above) and a day with a bobcat and driver, who tidied up the (small) pile of builders' rubbish and levelled off at the back of the house.





















This is argilite, the shale rock on this side of the hill on which the house is built. It's very beautiful: all sorts of shades of red, yellow and brown with the occasional streak of quartz or blue-grey stain.

The largest contribution to 'progress' has been our own engaging of John Lacey's earth moving company to do more ground works around the place. A couple of trucks' worth of road base has been laid in front of the house and down the slope to the studio where we're living which should make a hell of a difference to the site in the rain. I was surprised at how coarse the rocks were in the road base, but after a couple of passes with the trucks and a bobcat it has smoothed out considerably: the larger rocks have pressed into the clay sub-surface, providing a very effective anchor for the finer grit, crushed rocks and dust that make up the rest of the material. We should get a couple of years out of the new surface at least...













Pete the digger driver






Pete's almost balletic with that digger! He's currently digging terraces on the slope in front of the main house: that's going to be the site of our garden and we decided to go for broad terraces running in sweeps across and down the slope so that we have a series of flat areas to work with rather than a single slope. We want to plant some bits and have a flat lawn on some areas; digging it out ourselves would take AGES and frankly we'd like to be sitting on the grass drinking our Pimms before we're too old and decrepit to enjoy it... so we've invested (heavily!) in Pete's expertise and he's spending this weekend with us, digging out the terraces and putting HUGE granite boulders against the batters to keep the whole thing upright as it were.

You can see the back of the first terrace being carved out earlier this morning....





You get some idea of the size of the rocks with darling daughter sitting on them!









The other arrival yesterday - apart from the digger - was our brand spanking new firebox, which to me at least is an object of great excitement. We saw this firebox in a magazine and decided it was what we wanted because it is double-sided and so it sits in the middle of a wall and can heat both rooms. As our house is decoratively simple inside, this is going to be a real feature when it is eventually installed in a new wall in between the TV room and the dining area.





















Sam and Shannon drove all the way from Sydney to put it together, and will provide Warren with any telephone support he requires to install it fully.





















The great thing I love about it is that the fire glass can be either lifted (on a weighted pulley) or opened on each side of the firebox. The chimney that will be built around the firebox allows for the fire glass to slide up behind the opening, making it a very sleek construction. We haven't yet decided on an external finish around the firebox because we haven't yet got a proper idea of what it's going to look like in situ, so you could argue that it's a very expensive leap of faith! But I maintain it's going to look stunning when it's all put together.





















The flue and all the other bits and pieces for the fire are sitting inside the pantry waiting for something to happen...

Progress Report #2: the grounds

We realised that the external environment needed a bit of a makeover while the house is being finished, as you can see from the height of the grass in this photograph. We have the lovely Parramatta Grass (Sporobolos Africanus) running rampant on the property which can grow to 2m in height and is classed as a noxious weed. We also have African Feather Grass, Fountain Grass, Lantana and Camphor Laurels which are also noxious weeds... fortunately we don't have to napalm the block in order to eradicate them but we do have to take measures to control them, of which more later!






















The easiest way to reduce the height of the vegetation is to use a slasher, which is a horizontal plate fixed behind or under a tractor or ride-on mower. The vehicle drags the plate, which has blades or sometimes chains attached, over the land, flattening whatever is in the way. It's a very effective method of "mowing" a large area. We hope to buy our own tractor in the not-too-distant future, which will pay for itself in a relatively short period of time given that it currently costs us in excess of $900 a time to slash our lower slopes because of the gradient and the gullies.









These panoramas, up and down the slopes after slashing, give you an idea of the shape of the land in front of the house. On the bottom panorama you can see the slope that will form our main garden: we plan to cut broad terraces into it, enabling us to have flat expanses of planting and grass and a path down to the lower part of our land.





















The slashing was done a couple of weeks ago when there were a few days of dry weather, and it allowed us to walk over our block and assess it in relation to the house and studio buildings. We have walked over it before, but without the buildings it was hard to make decisions about our longer-term plans. Now we know where we want to put the tropical fruit orchard, the raised vegetable beds and the chicken coop, where the fence line will be (separating the cows from the garden!), where we'd like to put a pavilion structure eventually, and how to manage that big front slope.

















Part of the fun on our block is that we have two gullies running either side of the house and down through the paddock. Until now we've had very little idea of what to 'do' with them, but slashing allowed us to take a good look and make some plans. Managing water is a key issue on the property, not because of extended drought (we are SO lucky here compared with much of Australia!) but because of the damage large quantities of water can do if left unchecked. We have a sort-of dam at the bottom of the paddock which we will line and it will fill (and not seep away, as it does now) but we realised we could dam up one of the gullies and create a container for water nearer the house and near where we hope to put the vegetable garden.





















This is a picture of the earthworks taken from the bottom of the driveway. It doesn't really do justice to Paul the digger driver's skill in manoeuvring a big machine up and down the slopes! He was amazing, using the digger's 'shovel arm' to support the machine as he carefully moved into different positions so that he could excavate while separating out top soil, sub-soil (i.e. solid red clay) and scraping off the vegetation. He's been able to clear a large amount of lantana, big grasses and tobacco bush from the gully and will apparently be coming out to do some more when the weather allows him to do so.
















You can't really see how steep it is above and below the new dam wall in this picture, but this is a part of the gully that simply wasn't accessible before the digger dug!





















For a change of scenery Paul also dug behind the studio to create a 'bench' or channel in the hillside above the studio to move water safely down one side. We get so much rain here: we filled a 34,000 litre water tank in a single evening of not-particularly-heavy rain recently. On occasions when we really get rain, when it's like standing under a continuously pouring bucket of water, huge amounts of it move down the hillsides locally and managing where it goes is of real concern to us so that our buildings aren't at risk. While Paul was digging here, over a couple of days, the rain started again and we were slightly worried that he might end up on our roof!
















What is this, I hear you say? Well it's the inside of our sewage system of course! The contractor had to come in and 'seed' the system with nematode worms to digest our waste, but this could only happen after we'd 'fed' the system for a few weeks, which we have done... I was slightly concerned about what we'd see when the tank was opened up but I'm pleased to report that there was nothing exciting to see and nothing nasty to smell!

Progress Report #1: the house

OK, OK, I know... I haven't been very good at posting things recently! It's been a combination of being too busy elsewhere, poor internet connection and general laziness and I do apologize. To make up for it, here is a digest of recent photographs of the house, shortly to be followed by another post about what's been happening in the 'grounds'.

















I thought you'd like to see a different view of the house, taken from the new earthworks above the studio. See the following post for details about all the excavation work. Soon (we hope!) the bare soil will be covered with grass and then shrubs (once we've worked out how to prevent the wallabies from eating any mass plantings). The tree ferns are beautiful and they are staying right where they are!
















I do love this view of the house, nestled into the landscape. Some elements of that landscape look a bit raw at the moment, but that will change...





















Inside the house the floor has been laid. This has had its frustrations, not least because the contractor deliberately bought the wrong grade of timber which, as it is milled specifically for each job, meant we couldn't return it.





















We requested 'Feature Grade' which is the lowest quality, because it comes with all the knots and marks and colouration that we feel gives the wood some character. It was hard enough getting the guy to buy stringy bark for us (which we wanted because we like the look of it and it's locally grown) so we were furious when we found out he'd gone for 'Standard Grade'. His view was that we didn't really know what we wanted and that he didn't want to work with Feature Grade wood because he didn't want to fill all the holes! He simply couldn't comprehend that we didn't want him to fill the damned things, we wanted a floor with lumps and bumps in it!






















This is the resulting flooring (complete with pencil marks), and it's OK. It is less bland than Premium Grade timber would have been, but also less lovely than Feature Grade... Our next battle is set to be about what treatment to put on it! The contractor likes polyurethane and we have specified a natural oil. His response was "I'll use OIL-BASED polyurethane", so as you can see, we have a problem - but I have told Warren that if the wrong product is used it will be sanded off at his own cost and the correct treatment will be applied!





















This is a view towards the front door (which will also be oil-finished, just so you know!), with the planter in the foreground, having just been core-filled prior to being rendered.





















A bath with a view!