Garage Slab Poured

Hubby took the kids up to the block today while I was at work. He rang me quite excited to state that they had poured the garage slab!!!

My work colleague Roy suggested that I get the kids to put there handprints in the cement.  My hubby didn’t want them to get dirty hands, so I reminded him of the wipes in the car.  He rang me later to say the cement was to hard, so they wrote there initials instead :)

Roy drove me home (as hubby had the car) and to my delight agreed to go past the block on the way home!! *yay*  I managed to take a few dodgy photos with my camera phone will take more tomorrow with the camera.

They made a huge mess of all the excess concrete on the neighbours block! I would be spewing if I was them.

Rain, Rain go away I wanted my slab today

After dropping my daughter at school I had to go to the hospital to see a Dr, by the time I got up to the block it was 11am and raining.  It looks like they got as far as laying out all the string to mark the edges of the slab when the heavens opened. So instead of some lovely trenches being dug all I have is some string :(  Not happy Jan, we had such amazingly good weather over the weekend to.

The weather forecast for the next three days is wet and shitty, followed by more wet and shitty.  Looks like Friday might be fine, I am guessing they won’t do anything until next week Monday now :(

Ok so it was a day of extreme weather with hail storms, lighting, thunder, trees coming down and all that….. pussies, they could still sit in a metal machine on the side of a barren hill digging trenches.

On a  positive note my hubby has been busy taking calls from people’s computers that have gone belly up in the storm.

Retaining wall completed

I am just going to post photos and do the writing later, I am really tired after my first day back at work.

Sleepers with the Colorbond Woodland Grey sample.  The fences have to be Woodland Grey.

I don’t get the tradesman needs to leave rubbish everywhere.  Next time I go to the block I am taking a bag to pick up all the rubbish they left. There’s also half a sleeper left over.  I have to convince hubby to come pick it up with me.

The piece of wood says “Return for deposit”

The are going to dig the trenches on Monday, so going to go over the weekend and duct tape all the plastic up nicely.

Site Cut

Our site cut started Wednesday last week, one day early!

I noticed they had done the site scrape on the Tuesday, so took my husband up early Wednesday morning to have a look.  There was a guy working on the cut, a supervisor arrived as we got out of the car and I went over and talked to him.

The plans had the retaining wall coming across the back of the block and then dog legging in toward the house.  I asked if they could take the cut all the way out to the stormwater easement and there fore give me a little room at the back of the house for my washing line.

You can see the triangle here. The sleeper you can see poking up on the left if the survey peg for the neighbour behind and where the stormwater easement goes off.

And here it is cut out (looking from the other direction).

See how they piled all the soil over there near where the retaining wall has to go.  Yeah that’s what the retaining wall guy said to.

In the picture below see where the grass is scraped too on the right side? You can just see the survey peg up the back, that is our boundary! Our block looks to be all house and no yard at the moment! Hopefully when the slab goes down it won’t look so huge. I took our daughter out to look after school all she could say was “We have no yard”

The Olive Tree

At some stage there must have stood a massive olive tree on our block.  When we first saw the signs of it, we thought it was a weed.

	<—The first signs
	As it got bigger and bigger we eventually realised that it was offshoots from an olive tree stump.
	I rang the contractors and asked them to please make sure they dug it out for me. When we went this morning there was a pile of stumps.
	That was just the beginning. By the end of the day there where stumps everywhere; it seems this olive tree must have been huge. You can see there are still roots in the sides of the battening they have done.  This is a good 5mtrs away from the trunk. !

Today I received a letter in the mail from the Onkaparinga council, informing me of my responsibility to keep down the ‘weeds’ on our vacant block and to do so within 14 days or we would receive a fine!  Well they are all gone now :)

I think we started

This is a photo of the block on Saturday.

I took some soup to my Mum who was sick, and on the way home I went past the block, to see if they had dropped the machinery off for the site start on Thursday, and this is what I saw.

I hope this means they have started!! There is a lot less soil moved then I thought… and the cut up the back is supposed to be 1.4mtrs.  So hubby and I are going to have a closer look tomorrow.

I would be beyond excited if I wasn’t so tired.  Hopefully I can get a good sleep tonight so I can be excited tomorrow.  I rang the retaining wall person that we have contracted, he is going to have a look at it tomorrow, he said he can dig the trenches Thursday, put in the steel Friday, have the sleepers delivered Monday and be done by Tuesday :)

Survey pegs missing and site cut on the 10th.

So after playing phone tag with a woman at Statesman for two days she finally leaves me a voicemail message with her email address and a message that the site works can't commence as there is a survey peg missing.

I knew that when we had the site re-surveyed before purchasing that they put some site pegs in the ground, I also remembered seeing a survey peg laying in the mud in the reserve area across the road from our place.

I figured I could just roughly measure out the distance from the survey peg that was there and I would find the one on the ground easy. So I bundled the 2 year old and the baby into the car with the tape measure.

I got the the block and put Sam in the pram and walked up to about where the peg would be. I kicked around a bit with my sneaker and found nothing. I got the tape measure and measured 8mtrs (as long as the tape was) and then got Tomasz to stand in the spot and hold onto the tape measure, and measured out another 8 mtrs, then got him to come stand again, and measured a final 4 mtrs. I kicked about a bit and still found nothing. I was going to need a shovel!!

I walked up the hill and knocked on the door of one off the few houses that have been completed in the estate. Luckily someone was home and I borrowed a shovel. I measured out again with the help of my two year old, he was actually pretty good at holding the tape measure for me!

I scraped the gound with the shovel and found the buried peg easily!! I pushed the pram back down the hill, across the road and into the scrub, found the survey peg, pushed the pram back up the hill, and hammered the survey peg in with the back of the shovel. I got my 2 year old to hold the survey peg whilst I hammered it in. I stood back to observe my work and when I looked up there was a heap of guys pouring a slab two blocks away watching me!!

I came home and finally got the lady from Statesman on the phone, she gave me the name of the company that was going to do our site cut, then she mentioned "They are actually currently working on a slab two blocks down from you" I hope the bloody supervisor who said there was a peg missing noticed how 'easy' it was for me to find said peg!!

So I rang the company today to give them the details of my retaining wall guy, and to see if they can dig up the olive stump in the middle of our block. No problem with the stump, and they have us booked in for the 10th to do the site cut. The 10th !!! whohooo I think Tomasz, Sam and I are going to spend the day sitting in the car watching the digger work :)

I will have to go take some photos of the block on the weekend. The last time it shall be barren!! So excited!!!