Slaberific

Exciting times are upon us here in our little corner of the planet. The slab for the house has been poured and we've been spending our weekends banging star pickets into the ground to slice and dice our 18 acres up into paddocks. Who knew making drastic changes to the earth would be so much fun?



I've got next week off work, a stretch of time which will be spent focusing on completing the internal fit out of the stables. This will include a concrete base down the center isle, 3m out the end for the wash bay and a 4m by 4m tackroom.

We'll probably get a chance to layout the framework for the house and perhaps look at stringing the electric braid on the fence lines. We're actually getting closer to getting out of this rental!

Rain, Rain, Go Away

I'd probably get murdered by the local farmers if I said this in public, but all this rain we're getting is really hampering our building progress. Things have stalled once again as we wait for enough sunny days to dry out the soggy earth and allow us to pour the slab for the house.

We're near certain to have missed the end of June deadline to lock in the current first home owners grants and boosters. I'm a little uneasy relying on the liberal party to not get in the way of the governments plans to increase the bonuses from $25k to $36k as proposed in the 2009 - 2010 budget.

I'm glad that Utegate blew up in the lib's faces. Hopefully they won't be too eager to cause a double dissolution election.

We're also waiting on pouring the slab for the center aisle of the stables, after which we can put up the roller doors, build the internal stables and I can finally declare it done.

Then there's fencing.....

I just want to be making progress!

Stable Nears Completion

I'm quite proud to say that the stable block is essentially errected. All that remains is installing the roller doors and doing the internal fit out to make it habitable for the animals.

Alas I don't have photos of the completed masterpiece yet, because the weather has been terrible (well, good in a way... we needed the rain). I'll grab some shots when I can, but can assure you that the 'sandbank' cream colour of the walls which I'd shown before are wonderfully offset by the dark blue-gray 'iron stone' guttering and flashing.

On to the house!

Hopefully if there's a break in the rain the slab will get poured this week. It's amazing to think that we're only just now getting this done, a year after the kit was delivered to the block. Suddenly we're racing against time to ensure we get the most in our 1st home builders grants and such. Its required that the foundations are laid before the deadline at the end of June.

Over the recent week I've had two of possibly the most physically draining days of building. The 1st was laying 250m of power cable (in conduit) from the building sites to the front of the property. In the rain. Trudging through sticky red clay mud. The 2nd was using a petrol engine powered 250mm hydrolic auger to dig fence posts in the same conditions and soil.

Tricky Part Complete

I took the last few days of the working week off and combined with yesterday we managed to make a good start on getting the stable erected. I had hoped to get all the frame upright after the 4 days, but we were rained out on the 1st day and the 2nd day was spent finishing attaching each section while it was still on the ground. The 3rd day we erected the first section, only to run into woes when attempting to get it all plumb. We'd marked out the distances between the column footings from the plans, but when we got it standing up it became obvious that things weren't going to be milimeter perfect.

So yesterday we had to drop the section we'd put up and attack things from a new direction. This time around we unconnected the side sections and braced the central columns so they were parallel before standing it up. This also helped to stop the apex drooping and throwing everything out of wack. Once we had the center of the 1st end up, plumb and bolted to the footings things became a lot easier. As you can see from the photo we finished the day with 2 sections of frame up and have braced them together.



Alas there won't be any more progress until next weekend, but I'm damn happy to have made a decent start on the project. I'm also rather sore :)