Noosa Bound

Waiting for the rain to stop: Well things have been a bit slow over the last couple of weeks here at Noosa.   It seems (according to locals) we are experiencing unseasonable seasonal weather, of the wet variety. Given the early stages of building generally entails a lot of negative changes in elevation, wet dirt or mud as we know it, is not ones friend.    Mr. Mitarai and the ute in particular don't cope well. We have had heavy downpours followed by sun, then heavy downfall, etc, etc.  The ground never gets to recover before the next deluge. One afternoon's shower drop. So what's been happening?   I have had two flat batteries, one on the Merc and one on the ute, plus a flat tire on the ute to give me something to do.  And as I worked on making our temporary caravan surroundings a little more pleasant, I got the ute bogged in the paddock, and beyond redemption until the ground firms. I got into the paddock with a 1/2 ton of gravel, but ...

Saturday 15th June 2019: Today I did a 2 for 1; I got some practice with ' Mr Mitarai ' digging trenches and at the same time relieved (or hope too) some of the poor drainage around our current site for the van at Jamie's (my son's) place. There was some PVC piping lying around the back of he's shed, I bought some excess stock of a retired plumber (via FB marketplace) and a trip to Bunnings secured the rest required. At present the two water tanks catching water from the shed roof have their overflows just dumping straight to the ground at the tank bases.  This is not ideal and on top of the heavy rain of late, the rear paddock is very spongy; adding the roof runoff doesn't help.  Then add our grey water runoff from the van, and the situation is far from ideal. So the plan is, to pipe all that water down the paddock to an existing swale about 20 meters away, which then will disperse the water further down hill into the paddock I cut pipe and added app...

Wednesday 12 June 2019 Today was busy, with the morning deciding on specs for two purchase, a Mud Bucket for the tractor and water tanks for the site. A Mud Bucket is the business end of a backhoe but has a wider bucket or digging width compared to the typical trench digging bucket you see on most excavators.  As I'll be using the excavator to form the driveway, together with the front end loader (typically called a FEL), the trenching bucket would be painfully slow when required for certain digging actions. So after advice from the dealer where I bought BX, I got onto OzBuckets to order a 800mm wide Mud Bucket.  It'll take just three days to fabricate and paint (I'm going for black, not orange) and I can drive down to Brisbane and pick it up if delivery is more expensive than diesel. Below is my own birthday present, a Kubota BX23S compact tractor.  This tool is remarkably capable as a Swiss army knife. It can do so many things, carry stuff, dig holes or tr...

Introduction: This Blog will document the build of a new house built for my retirement in sunny (and at times humid and wet) Noosa. I'll try to keep a diary style blog talking and showing what I'm up to on a day-to-day basis when things are happening. At this time the status of the build is: Land selected and purchased; Architect appointed and concept plans finalised; Engineer selected for design of wall, roof and slab structural requirements; A plan set to allow an owner build to proceed; A caravan purchased as temporary onsite accommodation during the initial build phase; A 20 foot container purchased as a lockable onsite storage and workshop; Dual water tanks purchased to supply water during build and for later utilisation for permanent use; Bushfire report for design considerations Soil survey completed for engineering and septic designs Enviro septic design completed; Garden designer selected to advise on appropriate plantings for ...