We have arrived!
May 30th, 2007 - Posted in Kaimata Croft - by Sarah|
30th May 2007
It’s been a hectic month for us. We moved out of Blackball at the end of April and moved into our caravan in a temporary location here at Kaimata Croft. We spent the first few days getting the essentials like a loo and a shower (with hot water!) sorted. Drying off outside is very refreshing but we do have to watch out for unnannounced visits from the neighbours.
We also had a vist (pre-arranged) from our effluent engineer, Gerald, who will be designing our greywater system and approving our plans for the composting loo. We finished digging our first veggie patch, added a trailer load of mushroom compost and planted out all the seedlings that we had started off at Blackball.
We got a second lot of geotech engineers in after some problems with the report from the first. These guys actually measured things and seemed to enjoy themselves clambering up and down banks, wading along the stream and hacking at everything in reach with a geologists pick. Their report says what we want it to so hopefully that’s it until we need someone to sign off on our foundations.
We cleared some Pongas for the permanent site for our caravan and got a guy down the road to bring his digger up to clear some topsoil and backfill with river run from the Turamakau. While the digger was here we also got him to dig the trench for our power and phone cables which both went in last week and the trench is now filled in. In the midest of this we had a big storm with 30mm of rain and high winds which meant taking the toilet tent down in the dark – always fun. We also took time out to visit the West Coast Poultry Show and will be purchasing a rooster to keep our hens in line once the show season has finished.
We’ve reviewed the first draft of our house plans and sent them back to Ian for him to do the detail work. We’ll try to sort out a way of getting some pictures online soon. We’ve been given an ETA of end of July for our land-line phone so will only have limited internet access for a while. The power is due to be set up in the next few days though so we won’t have to cook by torchlight anymore.
It’s great being here though, we’re getting so much done. Brendhan is currently in the midst of clearing the trees felled for our house site and sorting out rainwater collection from the shed roof while I’m finishing off the thatched roof on our mailbox.
One final piece of news for all you sceptics out there – the Capri passed its WOF (MOT) first time!!
