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 trenches, move dirt, level dirt, pick up heavy items, etc. It has a '4 in 1' FEL, which means it splits in half so you can grab stuff with it too.
I also had a 'Thumb' added to the excavator backhoe which can also grasp things to move or lift things; handy. I think I'll call it 'Mr Mitarai' as Canon actually paid for it via my redundancy. It's a tough little bugger just like the old boss, except for the colour.
I also had been procrastinating for ages on what type and size of water tanks to install, either for temporary or permeant use. Gal slimness look the nicest to me, but are pretty expensive for high volume tanks. As we won;t be making a feature of them poly is a more sensible purchase per gal stored. The lack of love for poly is driven by the common cream and light green table that are everywhere, which just look cross and get dirty too. lately darker colours are available which surprisingly blending into backgrounds far better.
Robert and Gail, ex Sydney friends who made the move north about 20 years ago recommended getting the biggest ones you can, or as much storage as is reasonable. While living in the van one gets use to minimal water use, but once at Doonan and in a 'real' house I don't want to be water shy particularly when its just running off the roof for free.
After getting a lot of quotes I settled on a couple (2) of 5000gal (27k litres) poly tanks in colour bond Charcoal, a dark grey. These are pretty big at 4m diameters, so they will take up a bit space. However they will also shield the van from the street to some extent when initially positioned. With those two tasks completed and the bank balance reduced further it was onto the site to meet an electrician and await the container's delivery.
Temporary Power
Before moving the van onsite, power will be needed. This could be by solar (seemingly still a black art and plagued by shysters, temporary power connection or generator.
I'm starting with a temporary service as 1st preference so have met a few local electricians by referral to price connection to the existing underground power box.
This installation iss pretty simple however due to a number of things its a bit early to be digging trenches for this cable to lay. The main thing being the need to do some excavation around the areas where the cable will sit, such as the driveway site and the change of ground level required too sit the guest room.
I can't do too much excavation prior to BA approval. so the solution will be:
- excavate and profile a temporary driveway. As the building footprint was pegged out last week especially for this purpose, I now know where to start cutting this in. a temporary driveway will also allow trialling its suitable location, width and grade, all a handy thing to do before a permeant surface is installed.
- excavate behind the Guest Bed to get to the required floor level and shape the resulting slope.
As the Guest Bed is next to the driveway I'll be able to merge these two excavations (for all intent and purpose) and subsequently have what will be close to the permanent ground profile the power cable will underlay. That simply means I can dig the power trench once not have to retrench iy to do the driveway. So I have a few quotes, just need the time now to do the excavations.
Temporary Storage:
Once again I thought long and hard about storage and working facilities during the initial build sequence. Options were:
- a tent;
- a shed;
- a container; or
- combinations of all the above.
A container although expensive, will provide good water proofing, easy of assembly, and fairly importantly security for tractor and tools when we aren't on site. It's like a big safe.
I have been watching Gumtree and FB Marketplace to get a gauge on what costs what for some time. and with the need now getting close I pounced on a 20 footer which was actually for sale in the same area. Had a look and it was very solid and clean, dark red in colour but we'll repaint Charcoal as the tanks. Best thing was the owners gave me a contact that was very reasonable, only $143 to pick top and drop at my place, not two to three hundred other places were quoting.
So today I'm the proud owner of a maroon 20 foot container. It'll be up for sale as soon as not required any longer. Let me know if your interested :).
I had it dropped in the middle of the site as its final position will require the ground to be raised and levelled using the soil from the driveway excuvation. So it will have to be moved again in a few weeks, but it can be painted where it is, inside (white) and outside of course.
Looks like a scene from '2001'
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