We have the power!
July 27th, 2007 - Posted in Building - by Sarah|
27th July 2007
Well, we have decided that there’s no excuse to not update the blog regularly again now that we’ve got a reliable (touch wood) internet connection. Our phone line was connected today just two months after we first requested it. Whenever we’ve mentioned to our neighbours that there weren’t enough phone lines and that we’d been told a new one had to be installed from the main road (about 1.5km and across the railway tracks!) we always got the story about the new subdivision just up the coast at Punakaiki. Apparently a new hotel had opened up at the bottom of the road with phones in every room and used up all available lines – the new residents had to wait 6-9 months for a phone connection. So by West Coast standards ours is fast service and pretty impressive when you consider that we’ve even got it 4 days before we were told it would be connected.
Because we have bought a block of land that no-one has lived on before the process of installing the phone began about 2 weeks after we moved onto the Croft. The caravan was first moved on to a temporary site at the furthest end of the track from the road. Before moving we’d identified an area the right size for caravan, awning, loo and shower tent. It was between the house site and the road and was just filled with Ponga (Tree Ferns) which would be relatively easy to clear. We set about clearing it in our first week here. The Ponga were easy but the Supplejack (a vine which grows on trees) took a bit more effort. After a couple of days it was clear of plants but we still needed to remove the topsoil and get some river gravel delivered to provide a free draining surface for us to live on.
Caravan pad being created.
We’d noticed that a new garage was being built just down the road and a digger was on site there. So we went and asked if it was available to come up the road and clear a few square metres of ground for us. It turned out that it was and sure enough, the next day its owner ‘walked’ it up the road (strictly not allowed as the tracks chew up the road surface). It took the digger about half an hour to do what would have taken us a couple of days of shovelling. A few loads of river gravel were delivered and tipped into the hole and hey presto ? we had a pad for our caravan which will be a parking/turning space when the house is built. The digger was left here overnight and we got to thinking that while it was here maybe we should try to get everything lined up for phone and power cables to be laid so it could dig and fill in the trench before it was moved and we wouldn’t have to pay for it to come back again.
Caravan pad complete.
The next day and a few frantic phone calls later everything was lined up. 1. Telecom would come and mark where their underground cables were on the road so the digger wouldn’t dig through them. 2. The digger would dig the trench in the afternoon. 3. Brendhan would shovel layer of sand into the trench. 4. In the morning the power guys would come and lay their cable. 5. We would cover the power cable with some more sand. 6. The Telecom people would come and lay their cable in the afternoon. 7. The digger would refill the trench the next day.
It seemed impossible that all these elements would fall into place but on the day everyone turned up when they said they would and did what was expected of them. The problem came from a completely unexpected direction.
We woke on the morning of the cable laying to find that an overnight rainstorm had filled the trench with about 50cm of water. There was no way that anyone would lay cable into that so Brendhan zoomed off down to the digger man’s house and he came up and, with the digger, gouged a drainage channel from the trench to the edge of the terrace. The last of the water was just trickling out as the power van arrived and the cable team helped us to replace the sand that had washed away before laying their cable.
With cable in place we could now set up access to both power and phone and this was when we learnt that it would be the end of July before we got the phone. The power was faster ? just over 2 weeks ? and came on just in time as winter hit with a cold snap that same night.
So now we have got all mod cons ? a fridge, a microwave and an oil-filled heater (and Sarah is talkin g about a dishwasher! – Brendhan). More importantly we can charge the laptop battery and the mp3 player and as of today we can even connect to the internet without relying on intermittent mobile coverage.
Our new home all set up!
