Dig this!

We've finally started excavating the sites for the house, garage and stables. As you can see (hopefully) from the photo, it's quite a large area and very, very rocky - so much so that we've had to get the rock breaker in for some sections. The trench has now been dug for the power from the transformer to the house site and then from the house site to the machinery shed and we've started to lay the cable. Won't be long now 'til we have that wonderful stuff called "e.l.e.c.t.r.i.c.i.t.y"! The holes for the water tank and the septic have also been dug now.

We have all the quotes back for the frames and roof trusses and are in the process of deciding who to use. We've decided we're going for a timber frame instead of steel that we were originally considering. Since moving into the shed, we've come to realise just how noisy steel frames are, especially first thing in the morning when the sun hits the shed and last thing at night when it cools down. Also, television reception isn't that crash hot and all the steel seems to interrupt the digital set top box - so this was an enormous factor that influenced our decision :)

We're through!

We're finally through council and have our development consent. They told us it would only be 10 weeks and it ended up being 13 weeks - not bad considering they told us approval on the shed would take four weeks and it took nine. We now have to pay a $750 "erosion control" bond and then they will give us our construction certificate and we can commence work on the house, garage and stables. As we are constructing all three buildings out of the same materials, they will all go up at the same time. The plan is to lay the concrete slabs for all three at the same time, then put up all the frames at the same time, etc, etc. We decided to do it this way to save money and time, otherwise we'd be getting say the concreter to come out three different times or the electrician to come out three times and having to pay extra travelling costs and all that. Most horsie people I know who are building decide to put the stables up first and then work on the house - nooooo, not us!!

The conditions the council put on the consent are not too onerous or stoooopid. They were easy things to comply with regarding the wood heater, the driveway and the septic system we'll be using. Most of things they said we had to do we are doing anyway, so no biggy really.

Life in the shed is great. We have all our stuff with us now and it's been like Christmas unpacking the boxes and going "Ooooh, I forgot we had that". I used the vacuum cleaner on the rug for the first time in eight months and it really felt like a novelty - one that I'm sure will wear off quite quickly. Those of you who know us know that we have better things to do with our time than cleaning so it was quite funny to feel excited about vacuuming! I also tried to use the iron the other night, but because it cuts in and out, it was making the generator go up and down (noise wise) and it just freaked me out too much so I thought that that housework job could just go by the wayside. We've also been able to use the microwave so on those Monday and Tuesday nights when the pub is closed for dinners, we have microwavable dinners - again, such a novelty!

We still don't have electricity - but we're working on it. We're waiting on one more quote to come back.

Not much is happening horse wise. We've started training the horses to associate the quad bike with feeding time. They've caught on pretty quickly that when they hear the quad bike it means a feed and they come running. We're going to bring JD into work again in the next couple of weeks to see if he remembers his breaking in training.