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Today probably rated about a 3.5/10 in terms of house building excitement. On the one hand we could see that the poly insulation and steel mesh was just about complete over the whole house area ready for the pouring of the floor slab. On the other we had to decide locations for thermostats for individual rooms. Oh, the pressure!

I suspect I really shouldn’t make that sort of remark. I suspect in just a little while we will wish for such easy decisions!

As we had to go out to meet the heating guy we also took the opportunity to dig up another 100 or so lamb-ears. Those things are really starting to get us down! (And secretly the most important part, having to go out there meant I could confirm that the shed made it through yesterday’s gales and sideways rain. Which it did. With flying colours. Whew!)

Roll on Friday for the next big concrete pour. (All going to plan with the laying of the underfloor heating pipes, of course…)

Stop all your puerile snickering! Stop it now, or I’ll not tell you the story ok?!

Settled down now? Sure? Really sure?! Good.

Ok, so as you’ve been made aware through previous posts, we’ve been getting things ready for the pump-shed to arrive. And last night it did. On a trailer. In quite a few bits! But we’d had a copy of the instructions for a week and I’d managed to get the general gist of them, so I felt reasonably confident. Reasonably confident. And we’d got a good crew organised to help too. And on their Friday night too!

It helped us immeasurably that the guy from the shed place stayed for an extra few minutes and helped us get the four sides up with his expertise and, more importantly, his nail-gun. Gotta get me one of those! Actually, big thanks to the guys at shedsnz.co.nz. They were brilliant from start to finish!

Anyway, with the walls up in short order we just had to deal with the tricky roof bits. Without the help of the nail gun. Bugger! Have to use muscle power, and my muscles still aren’t used to wielding a hammer yet. Luckily with a few of us around we could spell each other when things just got too sore.

Really, things went pretty smoothly. Roof gables, roof bits, front and back bits, a heap of flashings… Any glitches we managed to iron out pretty quickly, and things progressed along right up until we worked out we needed a slightly longer ladder, and the light faded to absolute black, and we had to call it a night.

This morning Bec and I raced out with a bigger ladder to finish off the last little bits before it rained. Just the top roof flashing and the door closing hardware left to do, and we managed to get the outside stuff done before it pissed down. Our house builder (who was once again working on Saturday) came over and sheltered in the shed though a particularly heavy shower seemed duly impressed too. We’ll just have to see how it copes with a decent gale or two!

So there it is. The first fully complete construction on the ranch. Now we just need to get power and water into it, and we can camp out in it! Or at least have a jug and make coffee out there!

Huge thanks to all involved for making it a fun and successful build! We’ll give you a call when we’re ready for the chook-shed construction…

You were warned yesterday! Today it was all about concrete. Lots of concrete! First up, the base of the shed got its fill. Good work by the boys in getting it nice and smooth too!

Then on to the foundations. This involved the big concrete pumping crane and quite a few concrete trucks coming in waves. OOooh! Concrete trucks! Up close! Bonza!

While that was all going on, Henry got the final bit of the backfilling of yesterday’s trenching done. Go Henry!

And while all those guys were doing all that we got on with today’s bit of gardening to try to keep out from under the guys (and more importantly the trucks!). Digging out as many lamb-ear plants as we could manage before it got way too hot. They don’t seem to mind the spray that’s doing a good job of killing everything in the area we want to plant with a few natives, so it has to be manual labour to keep them under control for now. They’re buggers to get out! And the bit we did was where they’re sparser. I estimate we did well over 100. And it looks like a pretty decent pile we stacked up. What we’ll do with them long term, who knows! Need a compost heap quick that will heat ’em up and kill ’em good!

There’s a huge number more that we’ll have to try to tame before they start to flower for another batch to spread next year. Apparently they’re pretty, and some even plant them as border plants, but having seen how they spread out there I think we’ll be giving that idea a big miss!!

As we’ve chosen to build a bit away from the boundary, we’ve known we’ve needed to get power and phone from the fence to the house. Today was that day! As a bonus we were able to organise to get the water pipes in the same trench from the pump-shed to the house as well. That saved us another huge trenching job. Whew!

We did have to help chuck the pipes in the hole though. Felt good to actually do something ourselves that’s a vital bit of the whole house building thing. I just hope we’ve done it right! I assume we’ll know when we turn the tap on and no water comes out.

Only one small drama when we found a massive kink in the pipe and had to get the irrigation guys to pop out and add a join for us last minute. Which they did. They’ve been fantastic so far, as has everybody we’ve dealt with so far. Really fantastic! Hope that continues. I’m sure it will.

Tomorrow: Concrete!

Once again the weather forecast was for fine weather, and even better it was over a weekend! Not that what day it is means all that much to us still, but being a weekend it does mean that we can rope in some others that currently have to do that work thing… This weekend’s task was to get the base of the pump-shed installed, ready for some concrete to be poured into it sometime this week. OOOohh! Concrete!

Well, when I say “rope into”, we did have to put in 5 hours of hard labour into the front garden first, before we headed out to do the shed. No, that’s right. Not our front garden! These guys, they’re not silly!

But with a bit of help from Jeff, and a bit it of “help” from Jake and Lexi, and Mr. Level and Mr. Square, we managed to get the base in, square, and level. Much to my (and our builder that just happened to be out there) surprise. Of course it will probably all move about in the wind or something soon, but when we left it it was bang on, honest!

Not a bad job, if I do say so myself! Of course it’ll look far more impressive when the shed is actually up… And will be even more impressive when it stays up, as of course it will!

Being out there also let us review progress on the main building too, of course. The day’s thrill this time was gravel! And lots of it! All in big piles just waiting to be spread across the foundations ready for the concrete this week. I just hope that the foundations here are as square and level as what we managed ourselves! Given the amount of dirt and stones we had to move from the patch scraped by the digger driver for the pump-shed base plot to get it level, I give it about a 50/50 chance!

Things seem like they’re moving fast at this stage!

The weather report today sounded like conditions would be much better for spraying, so we loaded up the car again, and off we went. Sounds easy, but we were trying to drag ourselves out of bed as early as possible so we could start in the early morning when we figured the wind would be still asleep too. And just to make it that much harder, it was the daylight-savings change last night too, so we lost an extra hour. Yawn!

As it turned out, the advantage of starting early today wasn’t so much avoiding the wind (which managed to stay away just about all the time we were there) but managing to avoid an hour or two of the baking hot sun! Boy was it hot! And spraying about 900sqm isn’t quick with only a backpack sprayer, but we got there without expiring. Well, I say we, but Bec did most of the spraying in the heat while I did other chores like pulling out fences and rolling up wire. I’m not sure who had the better deal really.

So hopefully that’s stage one towards getting a reasonably big bit of dirt ready to plant some natives on sometime soon. The only small wrinkle is that one of the trees we planted 2 or 3 years ago that we thought were now dead sticks has a couple of itsy-bitsy-teeny-weeny leaves on it that means we’re not quite ready to pull it out. It might mean that in our stand of natives we have a single maple tree with purple leaves*. Hmmm. That might take some explaining! I think I give it a 60% chance of survival anyway. Mind you, it has managed to last this long. We gave it wide berth with the spray anyway.

The real bonus of the day turned up about 11am. A digger! So we were luckily on site when the first bit of dirt got shifted for the house. Well, dirt might be a bit of a misnomer. I think it’s probably 60-70% shingle and rocks, and 30% dirt. But at least some of it might be useful in a vege garden. If we can work out a way to separate it easily enough.

We even managed to keep out of their way most of the time as we were too busy with our own chores. I wonder how long that will last! For us it’s all pretty exciting really. I guess it’s starting to be a bit real now!

Still looks small though!

*That might sound a weird way of putting it, but three of us can’t work out if it’s leaved or leafed in “purple _____ maple.”

Today was chore day. Just a few little things to do, like collecting the base for our pump-shed. I knew we bought a station wagon for some reason! Much to Bec’s (and the shed guy’s) surprise, we managed to coax the 3.1m timbers into the wagon and even close the back door!

It did mean that I had to sit in the passenger seat like one of the many Barry the Bogans that seem to cruise around here, but maybe now I can see the attraction of the fully reclined seat position. Not sure I could ever drive like it though!

And as there’s some building finally started, we’re thinking it was about time that we started on the “garden” as well. So we stocked up the car with bits and pieces and headed out to the plot. First job, of course, was to admire the pegs that had multiplied since we’d last been out a bit. And discuss how it still looks small!

The main chore today was going to be a bit of spraying to kill the grass off so we can plant a few trees without them being smothered, but when the weather forecast suggests the day might be filled with “blustery northerlies” spraying isn’t really an option. Unless you don’t really care what you spray, of course!

So plan B. Harvest the seed heads of last seasons weeds. I assume these are foxglove thingees, but we’re not yet experts on the local wild-flowers and weeds. We probably did as much to help scatter the seeds as anything else, but at least we know now where there’s likely to be the biggest collection of them in the next few years if we decide we want to cultivate some!

It was nice to spend some decent time out there though, on a lovely but windy day. The spraying will keep!

I don’t think we’ve ever been so excited to see a pile of wood in a field before. Although maybe that’s not a great surprise to anyone! (Excuse the poor photo – memo to self: Make sure the camera hasn’t been flicked to manual in the bag before taking important shots for the record…) By the way there’s still a lot more wood to come.

But after seemingly forever waiting for things to start, it looks like we’re off and running with the construction! Things are finally happening on site. Yeee-ha! All a bit scary really all of a sudden.

As we’d been warned, at this stage with only a few pegs in the ground everything looks really small! Hopefully it will start to grow in size!

Expect updates to come thick and fast from now on in!

• May 2006: Jeff and Dad etc. visited a block of land that they thought we might be interested in eventually settling on.
• Jun 2006: I flew to NZ and back to the UK within a week to have look at it a couple of times, and start the process of buying it. I end up with a massive sinus infection for my troubles.
• Apr 2007: Title issues, after all the bits have been done like roads, fences, bores etc. Not that we were in a hurry. We liked getting the interest on the cash. Back in the day when you actually managed to get some decent interest. We start thinking about the house we want to put on it.
• Mar 2009: We start talking to the first building company/designers about the house. Slightly difficult to keep communications clear over email and Skype, but we pretty much manage.
• Sep 2009: We ditch them on the basis we felt they were useless, and the building company appears to go bust.
• Sep 2009 (still): We start talking to a new building company/designer.
• Aug 2010 (we think): The plans are finally submitted to the council for planning permission.

And now we’re just waiting, waiting, waiting, and for the first time in that time we’re feeling like we’ve got nothing we’re really able to do except wait. And we’re suddenly not liking it much. After all this time we’d just like some concrete (if you’ll excuse the pun) action finally! PLEASE!

Lately we’ve been struggling to work out what a bearable kitchen for us is. What size does it need to be so we can both be in there cooking at the same time and not end up driving knives in each other’s backs or standing on toes etc? What’s a decent layout for everything? Where will all Bec’s bowls go?

It’s all been a bit hard.

So last weekend we went to one of the local DIY stores with a bit of string carefully knotted into a few handy size lengths and a pen and paper and had a good look around and made a few notes. We also grabbed all the brochure/book thingees they had too.

That trip seemed to make Bec realise that yes, we can probably make do with a kitchen that’s slightly less than 20×20 meters!

Next stage was for us to work out where everything should go, and therefore what the final shape should be. Bring on Blender again for the 3D models and views! Once again it’s been fun putting the model together, and again we’ve learnt a bit about what we want and how things might work.

It’s just a pity my interior design skills haven’t got much better yet, but at least we can play around with the colours on the model before eventually committing to anything…

Of course what it finally ends up like is anyone’s guess at this stage…

Oh, and this time there was no cheating!  All the items in there are all my own work, which I’m quite chuffed about.