Coffeehouse.co.nz

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…

So here we were, all out in the backyard having a nice evening around the BBQ, wondering where the wind had gone and wasn’t it a lovely evening, and then, above our heads…

Three ducks decided that having a birds-eye view of our proceedings was necessary, and parked themselves on the roof for a bit, hanging their heads over the edge to say hello. And they didn’t even have an invitation!

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!

In all the excitement with tools and sheds, I forgot that while the boys toiled away on construction efforts, the girls planted some self seeded seedlings of natives that we had found on Saturday morning when we were clearing out the aforementioned garden. A few cabbage trees, and a lone pitto.

Lets hope that they manage to take a bit better than the first lot from a couple of years ago (more on them later in the week), but we’re out there to water them a bit more now, so I’m sure they’ll be fine… As long as the hares don’t like the taste of them, of course! And they were free, so no real loss!

(The white stone’s there so I can see where it is to water it!)

As we’re scheduled to take on the construction of a full on shed later this week, I thought I better confirm that I can still lift a hammer and wield a saw!

On the list of things we might find handy over the next few weeks was a garden sieve to (hopefully) enable us to attack some of the large piles of dirt that have been dug out of the foundations and separate the stones from the dirt. I suspect the pile of stones will end up higher than the dirt, but we’ll take what we can for the garden!

As a construction project it went relatively well. I’d give it about a 7 out of 10. I know what to do better next time. And given the size of the dirt piles, we might need about 10 of them and some willing workers to make a dint by the end of next year! Luckily we’ve got enough wire netting for about that number!

Big thanks to Megan for modelling it as well so you can get a good idea of scale. We’ll put her next to the dirt pile some time soon so you can compare.

Have I mentioned that the weather has been fantastic here lately? While the rest of the country seems to have been hit with rain and other grot, we’ve been lucky enough to get away with the occasional blustery day, with the rest being blue-sky stunners!

We decided that last night was just too good to waste, so a quick trip to the supermarket later as a happy troup of four so we could consult on the purchases, a bit of a scrub up of the BBQ, and we were good to go with the first BBQ since we’ve been back.

Normal division of labour was maintained, of course. Women in charge of the salads, and a bloke on barbie duty, but I think that worked out well! Bec does like her salads, and Nathan looked right at home with tongs in hand. I just handed out the beer, really.

Just a tad too cold to eat outside, but it won’t be long till we can hang out in the backyard all evening, I suspect. YAY!

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!