s e v e n i s a j o u r n e y

Well, after a few days of terrible weather, a break of lovely fine sunshine came in on Thursday. We spent Thursday and Friday gazing on and off at our two still-pregnant ‘paca, but I guess a watched ‘paca doesn’t pop or something. Today is also predicted to be mainly fine, so I can keep hoping they will be obliging, and give us a nice pair of girls. Please? We want them to give birth so we are free to get away from the farm for a few days during Tam’s second week off. We will see if it happens.

On Thursday John and his cousin/assistant Adam came up to lay out the string-lines for the new shed. He was training Adam in all the tricks to getting a perfectly square foundation, so I was able to learn too. Very useful. Once again a case where a bit of extra setup time saves lots of fiddling and correcting later.

On Friday John came back with his little 2.5 ton digger, and a big rented auger. We discevered that the fill used to level the site was of dubious quality- no surprise as everything the previous owners did seems to have some dubious aspect. When you are finding chunks of asphalt and top soil 5-feet down you know the job was not “done right”. The holes for the poles had to be 1.5 meters (5 feet) deep, so I was very glad to have mechanical assistance. That afternoon a city inspector came by to inspect my holes. We passed, but all in all it was quite a cursory inspection. My holes are deep and dark, and yet he didn’t even probe them. I was totally expecting him to probe my holes, with a hunk of rebar if nothing else. (If you are giggling right now it is due to your dirty, base and scatalogical mind. Get it out of the gutter!)

Today we mix and pour 10 cm (4 inches) of concrete in the bottom of each hole for the poles to rest on. On Tuesday next week John comes back and we lift and brace the poles- with the assistance of the digger. Then all we need is a few cubic meters of concrete poured in the holes, and we are ready for framing and cladding! Woot!

Oh, to get the builders mix for our “little pour” we went to a local quarry. Very cool. Pulled the Ute up to the appropriate bin and hopped out, shovel in hand, ready to load. Then a 30-ton loader pulled up, grabbed a giant scoop of mix, and dumped it on the deck. We were just at the weight capacity for the truck- you could see the suspecsion sagging. But it was a really quick way to load a ton of rock (1.01 tonnes, technically). The drive home with that much load was… interesting.