There's light (or rather warmth) at the end of the tunnel

Well, as the temperature drops into the minus fives and minus sixes, we move ever closer to getting the shed up and getting into some warmth. At the moment, the caravan is the same temperature outside as inside. We sometimes wake up with the top blankie damp-brrr. The council inspector came out very early on Tuesday morning to inspect the footings of the shed and inspect the site for the house, garage and stables. Thankfully, she said everything was okay and gave us the go ahead for the next stage on the shed. James is now organising the concreter to come out and put down the slab. This should hopefully in the next week or so. The materials like gravel, sand and all the crap that goes into a concrete slab arrived today. We're still waiting on quotes to come back on getting electricity from the transformer to the house and shed. Oh, what a luxury that will be when we can just flick a switch for a light or the tele instead of having to go outside into the freezing cold to turn the generator on and off!! We still will not have any plumbing in the shed but we will have a water tank outside that will become our dedicated fire fighting tank. And thankfully we left quite a lot of trees around the shed so we'll still be able to go to the loo behind them :)

On a sad note though, our dear little dog Spud is not well. At first we thought he was depressed (why not have a depressed dog when we have an anaemic horse and a paranoid budgie), but in the last week and a half he's deteriorated. For those of you who know Spud, he was such a hyperactive dog and a good hunter. Now, he shows no interest in anything, not even hunting, is very unco-ordinated and even accidentally walked into the dam the other night. He's now off his food as well and we're having to hand feed him little bits of "people" food that he can swallow without chewing. We took him to Sydney Uni this week for some comprehensive blood tests and they suspect he has some sort of lesion on the right side of his brain. The blood tests have come back negative which means that we now have to go back up to the Uni for MRIs and xrays next week. The vet is putting Spud on steriods until we get up there to help with the pressure in his brain. It's very distressing to see poor little Spud like this but here's hoping they find something that they can fix.

The process has commenced!

Yes, after 12 months of working on the house/garage/stable plans, wading through the mountain of BASIX criteria and changing our minds half a dozen times on the building location, today we finally took in half a tree in paperwork and lodged our development application with the council! They tell us it will only take 10 weeks to approve our plans, but after our experience with the machinery shed, we're expecting about 20 weeks!

It doesn't seem like six months have passed since we packed up the horses, dogs and furniture and moved out of our lovely brick home and into the caravan. Life has been very simple and very uncomplicated since then with no electricity and no running water. We decided to place the caravan in the middle of a lovely grove of native trees which, at the time, seemed like a great idea seeing as how the days were between 30-40 degrees. Now that it's winter, it doesn't seem like such a good idea, although we are a bit protected from the strong frosts that leave the cars iced over. The nights are down to -5 degrees with the days around the roaring 13 degree temperatures.

We applied for electricity in the week before Christmas and on 18 May 2006 the transformer was finally attached to the pole on our boundary. Even though we do have a generator which we mainly use to watch tele (yes, we just couldn't stand not watching the new seasons of McLeod's Daughters, Lost, Big Brother or Amazing Race), it's just not the same as reaching out and turning on a powerpoint for instant power. After the first cold snap in May, we decided to search our storage shed for our small blower heater and miraculously found it. We only have it going when while we're watching tele but at least it's better than wearing the three layers of clothes, beanie, scarf and gloves to bed that we were! What we now have to do is dig a trench from the pole to the house site (about 250 metres) and then from the house site to the shed site (about 150 metres). Then the electrician will come out, lay the cables and connect us up. We sure won't know ourselves with full time power!

We lodged our development application for the machinery shed (which will be our home until the main house is built) in January and nine weeks later we received approval from the council. On 23 May 2006, the excavations commenced. We now have a level site for the shed, a driveway, a 60m x 50m riding arena and a whopping dam. After the rain last week, we now have about five feet of water in the dam, which we actually didn't want as the dam's not quite finished - but who are we to complain about getting rain!!