Micks Distractions

Now that the ship­ping con­tainer has gone from our dri­ve­way we had a dump­ster bin deliv­ered, and hired a dingo for the day. I man­aged to

exca­vate and level the front yard, and

clean up down the side. I got it all fairly level and straight, but I exca­vated just a lit­tle bit too much in one spot and bent the gas pipe, and knocked over the front tap. We’ll have to get the plumber out to fix them. Oh well.
Next weekend’s job is the retain­ing wall. I’ll have 30m of 150x75 treated pine sleep­ers, and 2T of extra earth deliv­ered for this.

Well, I haven’t updated in a while, (around 1 month). But then again not much has changed. This is always the way. Once you move in every­thing grinds to a halt. Besides; I needed to spend some time with my fam­ily.
Floors: We’ve received the sec­ond load of floor­ing. This floor­ing hasn’t been milled as acu­rately as the old stuff so I’ve had to buy a proper floor­ing gun. This pushes the board in at the same time fir­ing a nail in. The gun is the same as a nor­mal nail gun, but the fir­ing mech­a­nism is a bolt at the top that gets hit with a ham­mer. This then fires a nail at 40 degrees into the tongue.
Bath­room: We’ve been using two par­tially com­plete bath­rooms. I have yet to com­plete the tiling around the bath area, and get the plumber back to con­nect the shower up prop­erly, (I’m using a span­ner as a tap at the moment).
Archi­traves: They’re not up, but I have to fin­ish the floor­ing first. These will go in eas­ily with my old paslode. I’m putting in remove­able mitre-less skirt­ing boards. These will allow me to remove them for ter­mite inspec­tions.
Dingo: I’ll be get­ting the dingo back toland­scape the ground. I need to get rid of the rub­ble out the front and shift a whole swag of dirt around.
Veran­dah: I’ll need to fin­ish off the above first. Then I’ll get the con­cre­tor back to lay the con­crete for the front veran­dah. Then I can put up the veran­dah.
After all this it’ll be fin­ished. Hooray!

Back on to the trench­ing. We

chucked in the pipes,

had the odd smoko,

thought about how lit­tle money we have now, and

put in the ag pipe.
Later we filled in the trench and half cov­ered the pipes ready for inspec­tion.

The plumber came today to do a cou­ple of things. I was also there help­ing him out with the storm water trenches and retain­ing pit. We had 9 tonnes of 25mm blue metal dumped and we shifted most of it into the

trenches and pits. If I had tried to do that last year I would have had a really sore back and mus­cles, (being an IT geek I tend to just sit in a chair all day), but since I’ve been build­ing I’m used to it now. I’m down to 75kg now, so it just goes to show what a bit of rigourous con­tin­u­ous exer­cise does for you.

It’s time for the ser­vics to go in. I had spent some time decid­ing whether to go DSL or stick with Optus. The ongo­ing costs are cheaper with DSL, so I trans­ferred my phone over to Tel­stra, (a pre-req for get­ting DSL), bought a modem, and rang up the sub­bie to get my DSL line installed. BUT! I have no idea where the Tel­stra line is any­more, and the sub­bis is going to charge $120 call­out and $20/15min. Aaaargh! I can­celled the switch and stuck with Optus.
I rang Optus up, they came out and gave me a quote for $280 for the under­ground cable. They gave me a sheet on what I had to do which is basi­cally do every­thing up to the point of installing the cable. So I spent Sun­day dig­ging out the power trench and lay­ing 32mm Telco con­duit. I bought extra con­duit and put that in the trench as well. You never know WHEN you might need it.