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!

Living here

This was the view south-westwards across our block of land a couple of days ago: green, peaceful, and with lovely trees and tree ferns. We've been here for two weeks now and we're coming up to the last couple of weeks of the long summer holidays, so life will slowly achieve a balance and become normalised, so I thought I'd give myself a chance to reflect on the newness and difference of living up here before it all becomes obscured...

















The fact that I'm noticing the heat of the sun and the necessity of using a factor 30+ sunscreen at all times is, I think, an indicator of a different attitude. Up here we're feeling quite close to nature and a lot of what we do is outdoors. Living in a lovely house with a lovely view in Korora we hardly set foot outside unless we were getting into the car to go somewhere. This was partly because we had no functional back garden space for such a long time that we stopped doing all the things we'd enjoyed when we lived at Wakelands Road, such as eating outside or reading a book on the reclining chair... and we didn't have a pool as we had at Wakelands Road either. If we had been able to enjoy the garden space I think we could have enjoyed being outside, but instead we stayed indoors, turned on the air conditioning and isolated ourselves.

Coming up here we've started to get used to being outdoors a lot more, and letting the outdoors in. Over the last couple of years there has been a HUGE change in my attitude about this: I am now perfectly sanguine about ants (big, small, bloody ginormous!), cockroaches and spiders in the house. I don't like them, but I live with them. It's unavoidable and I haven't got the time to spend standing on a chair, screaming. Admittedly, when I bent down the other day and discovered I was eyeball to several eyeballs with a huntsman spider that has taken position on the shower screen I was a little startled, but I let it stay there! Doubtless it has wandered off and will reappear, but I'm shrugging about it rather than panicking.

We’ve had a really hectic couple of weeks. In addition to the joys of unpacking we also had a week of ferrying darling daughter to Bellingen and back for Camp Creative (45km each way, twice a day – about 4 hours a day once you factor in everything), with the added side-effects of complete exhaustion on her part. Plus it was her birthday and we had a family dinner that evening and a beach party yesterday with 20-odd children and a lot of adults. Today has been our first chance to laze around and lie-in, and I have to confess that as I write this at almost 1pm we still haven’t had breakfast, although I have managed a shower!

Dearest husband requested a weather station for his Christmas present, which he duly received although we haven’t set it up yet, and this too is symptomatic of our different lifestyle. I bet there’s a part of both of us that aspires to the compilation of a beautiful and informative diary of our block complete with weather readings and observations from nature, but I’m doubtful we’ll manage it! Instead there’s a more general ‘eye on the weather’ at all times. Rain means water in our tanks but also increased difficulty of access along the dirt track (and nervousness from me as I’m not used to difficult off-road driving, even if our Subaru allegedly has ‘all wheel drive’). Thunder and lightning may mean rain, definitely involve a lot of exciting noise (we have a metal roof and a BIG view). Wind means lots of rattling and the danger that anything not tied down might blow off the hillside which, when there are still lots of boxes stacked around, has some implications... So now we’re firm fans of various websites (although ironically if the weather’s bad we might not be able to access them) such as Country Energy’s storm tracker, The Bureau of Meteorology’s 128km Grafton radar loop and Elder’s forecasts.

Today the sun is shining although there might be late thunder; it’s 29°C inside the house with the fans blowing (we can afford to put the fans on full blast because the sun is shining), and a good 35°C outside in the breeze. I didn’t put our little sensor in full sun so it may actually be a bit warmer than that. I’ve got the sheets washing because it’s a good day for generating electricity and a good day for drying sheets, although there has been added fun getting the whole laundry issue sorted out. If you read my BookArtObject blog you may have spotted the washing machine sharing space with my printing press in what passes for a studio i.e. the garden store at the end of the office/studio building. Of course there’s no plumbing for a washing machine apart from an inlet tap from the rainwater tank, so we’ve rigged up an extension hose to take the laundry water out of the building and into a water butt some distance away. We’re using this ‘grey water’ to irrigate our fruit trees which are arranged along the back of the building where they get sun and some shade. We don’t have a clothes line so we’ve mended a couple of broken clothes airers with wire and they’re sitting outside the garden store, baking the sheets nicely as I speak.

The sheets were filthy for no other reason than the amount of dirt we are tramping around the house. The state of the clay ‘road’ meant it was wise to shovel a remnant pile of sand, mixed with a cement mix, around the house with the idea that after some rain this would provide a better (temporary) road surface that would enable us to get in and out of our block more easily, but in fact we haven’t had any substantial rain so the sand and the clay are being traipsed everywhere. We also have an unsealed cement floor in the office/studio, which is itself very dusty, so our feet are filthy by the end of the day and so is anything (like the corner of a sheet) that accidentally ends up on the floor. We noticed this morning that the water coming out of the washing machine was a dirty red colour, and the sheets look surprisingly white by contrast!

None of this is ground-breaking. The pioneer white settlers coped with much more, clad in severely impractical garments... how women managed to keep everyone looking presentable in the heat and the dust I have no idea and can hardly bear to think about. But it’s the closest I’ll ever come to pioneering and after a cushy life with all the mod cons it is a little different. Once we’ve moved into the house I daresay many of the glitches will have been ironed out; after all, I’ll have a laundry with a properly plumbed-in washing machine, but in the meantime it’s fun to have occasion to reflect on things I usually take for granted.

In the beginning...

...Was chaos, and chaos ruled the house until the pair of us did some serious work in the heat and the humidity and brought order to the chaos. Or almost.

Mud, glorious mud

Apologies for the cross-posting but you may like to hear about our adventures with mud over at Double Elephant! And yes, it does have something to do with our house... now I'm going to have to go and clean up!

ding dong merrily on high

We're getting there!
















We went up to the block yesterday to get a run-through of the solar electricity system, which is now connected and fully functional! AND... Michael signed off on the Biolytix sewage system as well. Apparently we have to "innoculate" the system for a couple of weeks before the installers come back with the worms and microbes, which is a posh way of saying that we need to use the toilet properly for a while to give them some food! Darling daughter had the honour of being the first innoculator (although I don't suppose in years to come she'll thank me for announcing that!). I had a moment of panic when there didn't seem to be any water in the toilet, but of course it was the first time it had been used and water had to travel along the pipes from the tank. Phew.

The above photo is of what will be my studio, complete with dearest husband standing in front of the new sink unit (very nice). My printing bench will be next to it shortly, serving as a temporary storage/food prep area until we move into the main house.






















Now that we have a working solar system we also have ceiling fans and lights! The recessed lights are 21W LED lights that look a lot like halogen down lights but aren't... much more energy efficient and 'green', and 3 times the price, but never mind. Because of the relatively high ceilings we're not expecting them to light up the place in a dazzling sort of way, and in any case we prefer task-oriented lighting so I have 2 vertical fluorescent tubes above my printing bench and plenty of plugs for lamps, which I will have to convert to using LED bulbs.





















This shows the small bathroom in its glory. We've chosen amazingly cheap dark grey floor tiles and flat white matte wall tiles. The vanity unit was cheap(ish) but smart (drawer unit is on the floor in the front of the first photo), and the fittings were on sale, as were all the ceiling fans! The ceiling fans are all reversible so that we can draw down warm air from the ceilings in the winter, and they were reduced in price by over $100 so we bought all 10 that we need for the house, thereby saving ourselves over a $1,000 dollars!

The savings in the ceiling fans and the floor tiles will - hopefully - accommodate the extra we're going to be spending in some other areas such as wine storage. We went up the other day to meet someone about the cool room, and he turned out to be a brilliant source of pragmatic advice and creative ideas. Now we don't need a huge cool room and were planning to place it diagonally in a square space so that we could fill the rest with wine storage, but our friendly refrigeration specialist (I'll call him Martin but I'm embarrassed to say I can't remember his name. Oops!) suggested making the cool room square, to fill the space, because it will reduce costs and maximise materials by avoiding cutting into the standard-sized sheets of wall/insulation that they use. However, he's shown us a way of using one side of the cool room as a partitioned wine cellar and - here's the fun part! - cutting access into the front of it i.e. from the dining room side of the wall, with snazzy glass doors so that it looks like a swanky commercial wine storage display. Wow! What a great idea, and I could see darling husband's eyes light up at the thought. Additionally, darling husband came up with the equally jazzy idea of using a coiled copper pipe running vertically through the cool room from the exterior water tanks to cool the water on the way through and dispensing it via a dedicated 'drinking water tap' on the pantry side of the wall, above the sink, and thus making great use of the available refrigeration to get cool drinking water and obviating the need for a fancy zip tap.

The only downer is that the kitchen people who gingerly made their way up the muddy track (we'd had a LOT of rain again) to the house still can't see what I'm getting at about the central kitchen storage/island units and so I still don't have anyone lined up to build them, and that could be a bit of a problem.

Advent Calendar

It's been a little while since I posted any pictures, but there's been a lot going on! I had hoped to be able to put some more photos up of the interior of the office/studio building that we're moving into in a few weeks' time, but the painters were up there today and everything had been shrouded in protective plastic so it didn't look very photogenic... the upside to that is when we're next up there the shrouds will have come down and the paint will be dry! Meanwhile, we've been busy chosing LED light fittings and thinking about the kitchen in the main house.

Tomorrow we'll be up at the block all morning: Michael will be supervising the sewerage people as they dig the trenches (and the big hole) for our Biolytix system which is being connected, and after I've dropped darling daughter off at school I'll be joining him to meet a local kitchens company to talk about interiors and measure-up.

















This view is slightly out-of-date as the support timbers for the front verandah have now gone up, as you'll see in subsequent photographs. But it gives you an idea of what the completed house will look like from the office/studio!
















This photograph is taken from the top of the slope in front of the front door (which you can just see on the very left hand edge of the shot, draped in plastic to protect it). The verandah shades the huge stacking glass doors of the main living area. The large 'planter box' made of besa bricks on the left side of the verandah as you look at it here will be lined and turned into a pond. The smaller one you can see on the right side of the verandah, just in the shot, will be planted up with culinary herbs.





















The 'pond' will be over 3m long! We'll be putting native fish in it to eat the mosquito larvae.

















Under the special render on what will be darling daughter's bedroom is a special foam block insulation: easy to construct, very well insulated, and coated with a solar-proofed paint... once we decide on colours!

















Remember our comments about the outline foundations in a previous post making the place feel small...? Not any more! This is a view down on the roof of the main house with 74,000 litres of water tank at the back of the house. It's huge.






















I took this photo half way up one of the drainage benches at the rear of the property because I wanted to see the effect of the 'pop-up' roof. The clerestory windows are louvred to allow a free flow of air through the house as we won't have air-conditioning.





















The solar panels are going up on the arrays, as well as on the shed roof.











































This is what the house looks like from the bottom of the block, next to the arrays. Although the benches in the hillside appear quite stark against the green I don't think the house intrudes too much into the landscape.
















And this is what both buildings look like from the bottom of the driveway. In a couple of years' time, when we've planted around the house, they will almost disappear...