The shed has almost been finished apart from the flashing’s along the front and side.
The 33000 litre water tank arrived on the 3rd of April and I used Bill Hendersons Merlo loader to cart it up to the site that I had prepared for it. The tank it self weighed around five hundred kilos so it was a slow trip up the hill but I managed to get it in to place with out any help.
Once it was in place I had to get inside the tank and fight water level indicator so that I will be able to see how much water is in the tank from the house site. I put a hose in the creek to a small container then another small hose from there to the tank to fill it up. When I first measured the amount of water running into the tank there was only half a litre a minute which would take forty-four days to fill. A couple of days later we had rain and the tank was full in about a week.
With a sixty meter drop to the house this will give us very good water pressure with out the use of any pumps and later on I intend to add a pelting wheel so that the excess water will also create power for the house at no cost.
On the 14th a lot of things started happening. We had Allistar Gibb turning up with his thirteen ton digger along with the guys from Rates plumbing to do the drains and Greg Townsend the electrician to put the power cables from the shed to the house. Also on the same day most of the kit set for the house arrived. Luckily my wife’s parents spotted the truck driving through Geraldine and txt me as it was also towing a trailer and my access is truck only in good weather. I managed to drive out and meet him before he got to far in. when I drove up to his truck the driver looked real worried as he had come all the way from Wellington and now he thought he was on a dead end road. He was very relieved to see me. I showed him where he could leave his trailer and just bring his truck up.
He lifted the parts of the house off onto my small car trailer and I towed that up to the building site one load at a time as the track was starting to get quite wet and he was driving an eight wheeler that would not have got around the corners. The roof trusses were the biggest load and as he started letting the weight of them down onto my trailer the back of my ute started lifting off the ground so we got Allistar to bring the digger down to cart them up. Once the truck was empty he went out and transhipped his trailer load over onto his truck and we repeated the process until everything was up at the building site.
The Rates guys had done a good job of all of the drains and we got most of them covered with pea metal but as it has turned out what we had thought one load would do has now turned into three loads to cover all of the drains. On the 16th Peter from the Timaru district council turned up to inspect the drains and gave them all the tick of approval so far. On the day he turned up it was pouring down with rain and has hardly stopped in the last 24 hours and looks to be raining for the next day or two so there will not be to much progress on the house until the weather starts to pick up. As soon as the weather picks up we will be staining the cedar logs as it should be easier to stain the house before it is built.