Hello everybody!

As you can guess, it’s been a busy time with our little girl and our blog has been getting neglected.

Willow is now 4 months old (where did the time go?) and we are still in the shed with the house a long way off.  Never mind … we’re comfortable and Willow loves the shiny silver walls in the shed.

Our plans for the house are in with council but of course now we are thinking of changing them which will make the approval process take a lot longer.  The aim is to have a house by the time Willow is in Primary School.  It is a joke but could possibly become reality.

Rob has been working hard as usual, his business has really taken off, he’s a doting dad and somehow he still finds time to chop wood, mow and basically keep the place running.  Thanks Rob!!

Plans for the house have been coming along well and Meg and I have been working hard on decisions for the house; what to build, where to build it, how am I going to be able to do it etc etc.

Raph came up to visit and as part of his Uni holidays, he spent a while on the spade and crowbar.

A couple of “lightening strikes” saw some trees fall over near the proposed house site, so we thought that we should get rid of the stumps.

How hard could it be? Surely we could just dig them out?

The Blue gums around here tend to grow with multiple trunks sprouting from a base and trimming the trunks down was easy enough. The plan was to dig around the base and hopefully under some roots before lighting a decent bonfire to burn the rest away.

This sounds great in theory, but the first fire that we lit went for three days…

The end of the first stump was the second burning and coincided with the first camp oven chook. After burning for a few hours, the monster chook (over 3Kg) was stuffed with lemons and onions, seasoned with pepper, salt, garlic and chilli and placed on a bed of lemon peel in the camp oven.

Raph dug a huge hole, about a foot and a half deep next to the fire for the camp oven. We backfilled with red hot coals from the base of the stump to about the halfway mark before putting the camp oven in and completely covering it over the handle – even though the handle was pointing straight up.

Three hours later, we hooked out the camp over and had the juiciest roast chicken with gravy and steamed veg picked from the garden.

With the first stump pretty much finished, Raph and I started on the second after a night of a neighbour’s great cleanskin Cab Savs. (Maybe a mistake?)

The blisters came thick and fast as we tackled the second stump and consumed what felt like our bodyweight in cool rainwater.

Pa came over in time to lend a hand and we dug up to a metre down around the stump. Not a bad effort for three hours on the spade.

The fire was big, but safe as the hole was surrounded with dirt, stopping the wind from blowing embers across the ground.

A heap of wood and days later the stump had taken a battering. Maybe one more burning and it will be gone.

It sometimes seems like we are taking small steps in the process of building the house, but each step gets us closer.

Our recent trip away gave us a fair amount of time to chat and think about where we are going. It was about 6000km of travel in a bit more than two weeks and that adds up when you are sitting beside each other and cruising along.

Meg and I talked about some plans for The Journey and got some motivation and inspiration along the way.

The latest plans for the house are for a large living area including kitchen, dining, lounge with a large amount of decking out over the hill. The position of the house (proposed, at the moment) has this room perched over the start of a gully between two hillsides with the decking joining the hills together.

Other rooms will be self contained with walkways joining them together.

We think that we can start with the larger living area, a bedroom and a laundry/bathroom/wet area room, so three buildings in total. Then, as funds and energy return, we can expand into other bedrooms and guestrooms as well as an office.

Besides the house, there is heaps to do including; a garden shed, another tank for gravity fed rainwater to the shed, winter vegies and a garden revamp, a chook house, some more fencing for stock and some stock of some sort.

This is beyond the immediate day to day requirements of work, exercise, producing vegies, fuel (cutting wood for the fire) and living and enjoying our part of the world.

Talking of dreams and ideas, I’ve been watching a show called “Grand Designs” on the ABC occasionally and picking up a lot of ideas and processes about building. This week a couple is building with straw bale (even though it was shot in 1999) and I am interested to catch it.

You can also check it out online at their web site:
http://www.channel4.com/4homes/ontv/grand-designs/

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about bushfires while working of various projects or just watering the garden. Bushfires are something that we’ve chosen to live with as anyone in Southern Australia who lives outside of a major city will have to deal with. Bushfires happen and the best way to survive is to have a strategy in place for prevention and also for protection.

The other thing that I’ve been considering is the house location and the likely direction that the fire will come from. Most big fires will be on very hot, dry days with strong northerly winds pushing the fire front south, so a buffer around the property in this direction is a good idea.

Luckily we have the stock paddock on the northern side and the cows are currently doing a good job to reduce the load in this paddock.

Having the bore on the property is a great advantage as well. If we can keep a large tank of water available for fire fighting then we have a better chance of stopping the fire, but we also need to transport that water to the fire before the CFS (Country Fire Service) arrive, assuming that they are not otherwise occupied with another fire at the time.

My plan for this was to buy a fire pump that could be used either from the 5000 gallon tank on the hill or with a smaller trailer mounted tank. I could then also use the small tank for watering trees that weren’t on irrigation or transporting water to stock as well.

After the usual research around the place, I found a pump and thanks to a chat with brother in law, Rod, found a 1000 litre tank from Pat the Drum Man in Adelaide.

More research with Mid North Irrigation and I had some fittings and some suction pipe and all I needed was some time to plumb everything together and test it.

An afternoon presented itself and after a bit of work with reducers, nut and tail connectors and the obligatory hose clamp, I filled the tank, mounted the pump and drove off to see how it worked.

Using one inch poly instead of fire hose won’t be a permanent solution, but it was enough to test the setup and pump 500 litres in only a few minutes at a considerable distance from the pump.

I feel much better now that certain things are in place. Murphy’s Law says that if you are prepared you’ll never have to use it, so I’m hoping that my preparation prevents this fire. But in the worst case, we’ll have some way of reducing the damage.