Breaking Rocks in the Hot Sun

"Breaking rocks in the hot sun, I fought the law and the law won", or so the song goes.  After many months of waiting for various approvals the actual work has commenced on the building phase in earnest.  The first task at hand is earthworks.  Given the location in the Perth Hills that means we have laterite cap rock generally from within 0.1 to 1.5 meters from surface which makes digging holes somewhat challenging.  There are various items on the earthworks schedule.

• Tank pad: an area around 12.5 meters in diameter needs to be leveled for the first tank
• Leach drains: 2 x 18 meter trenches for the leach drain segments to be laid in need excavating
• House pad: including clearing the area, cutting down into the hill several meters then bringing in a pile of sand to create a level stable pad to build the house on.

Brett hired a small 1.5 tonne excavator for a week with a hammer and collection of buckets to manage the tank pad and leach drains.  Never underestimate the amount of fun men can have with machinery.  The little machine performed admirably well and achieved all the required goals set for it.

   Breaking rocks in the hot sun (tank pad)

The baby digger on the leach drains

The arrival of the big digger on site on Wednesday spelt the end for the trees that needed removal from the building envelope.  It is quite awe inspiring to see how easily an 18 tonne excavator can push over a tree.  Several hours later the area looked like the site of a small thermonuclear explosion with shattered remnants of trees spread over the area and several large craters remaining where the trees once stood.  It was certainly a transformation that had everyone in the area stopping by to check out.  It has opened up the view from the road down to the valley significantly.

Timber

Once the area was cleared it was down to the task of cutting back into the hill.  This involves breaking down through the lateritic cap rock using the big hammer attachment.  Having sat for hours on the little digger to break rocks for the tank pad and leach drains it was pretty amazing watching the big machine smash through the cap rock like butter.  At the high point of the house pad the cut needs to go down 1.7 meters into the ground and at the time of writing this the big digger was well on the way to achieving this.

The big digger breaking rocks for the house pad cut

Building Approval

We have been granted building approval.

WOO-HOO

Putting up the owner builder sign and celebrating with a glass of bubbly

Now the work begins.  We have hired an excavator for a couple of days to start the earthworks.  The main earthworks contractor can't start for a couple of weeks but we hope to do the rainwater tank pads, shed pad, services trench and leach drains ourselves to save money.

Excavating the Rainwater tank pad

Plans Submitted to Building

Finally the plans were submitted to the council's building department on Friday.  The plans were certified  for CDC (Certificate of Design Compliance) which means they go through the certified path in council.  This means the council, by law,  has 10 working days to approve the plans.  They can't reject the plans as they are certified by a building surveyor as meeting all Australian building standards and codes.  Within 2 weeks we will be able to commence earthworks finally!!!!!!!

To celebrate we took a bottle of wine up to the block on Friday night and had a BBQ.  Given it was the last of the dry weather for at least a week we took the opportunity to light up the bonfire and toast a few marshmallows (standing 20 feet back).

Brett has been busy talking to the earth moving guy, working out which bits Brett can do and how to do the earthworks as cheaply as possible.  To this end we will be hiring a small excavator for a few days and doing some of the work ourselves.

Melinda has been busy getting quotes for concretors to lay the house pad.  We are pretty sure we have identified the concretor we want to use.

Things are starting to move.