Bonfire glory

One of the most pleasant surprises of our deconstruction experience thus far is the humungous volumes of primo fire wood we are collecting. Tonight marks bonfire number 4 since we started work on the house. Yummy venison sausies too :-)

Deforestation finito

We called in an arborist to finish off the green decimation; Luke put his fine Jedi skills to good use taking down the silver birch tree & hiring us a monster chipper which veraciously consumed all other green matter. A fun day! Suddenly we have a huge section :-)

Here's a short video of the garden muncher in action

Garage goneburger - 1st weekend of July

First building to go under the sledgehammer was the garage, a wonderfully simple structure to take to pieces. We found a surprising amount of good timber under the old iron. Also of interest was the complete lack of any attachments to the ground - we got to a point where the easiest thing to do was simply push the thing whole over! Now onto the house...

Getting started mid/late June - Deforestation & Moving stuff

The last week has been a hive of activity here at 3 York removing as much green stuff as possible - basically most of it is in the way of our construction plan, so it's gotta go. It's a great chance for us to remove a number of native trees which have gotten humungous, let a bit more light into the place, & replace them with some yummy fruit trees.

By the end of June we should have most of the big trees removed, with the exception of 1 monster silver birch which will need an arborist. So far so good...we've only broken 1 handsaw, the chain off our weeny teeny chainsaw, & bodies are coping with all the repetitive sawing mostly OK :-)
Our biggest success was toppling the cherry tree (a non-edible variety unfortunately)...see these links for the action:

cheery tree - almost      cherry tree down!


























Moving stuff without a car has also been interesting. Fortunately we've got plenty of storage options close by, & the bike trailer turns out to be quite handy for gathering masses of banana boxes from St Martins New World.

Digging for treasure - late June

After learning that digging out our sewer pipe might cost us close to $3000, we decided we'd give it a go first & see if we could mole our way down the best part of 2 vertical metres. The guy at the drainlaying company reckoned we'd be "built like bloody gorillas" by the time we finished :-)
The result was ridiculously easy - after 5 hours moling we found our pipe, thankfully buried beneath the softest most benign sandy soil you could possibly imagine. Almost as easy as building sand castles at the beach :-)