The cost of clearing trees for the building site

As per her New Year promise, Viktoria has finally organised for the clearing of the building site.

We have decided to use a local company called Southern Excavations (you can click on their name to go to their website). The area we need to clear (by law, and particular to our site under the Bushfire legislation) is approximately 5000 square metres (or about 1.2 acres). Brian Monks and his team at Southern Excavations will take about a week to fell the trees, limb them and cut them into usable logs which will be stacked at the top of the property and all the limbs and undergrowth will be sorted into manageable piles for later destruction. They have quoted us $8,800 for all this.

Given they are an excavation company, we also asked Brian to have a look at the driveway option we had drawn on the site plan and quote for this as well. To construct a rock retaining wall to support the road access (which is to run to the middle of the building site as planned, lade with 60-100mm of road base gravel which will be rolled and compacted will be $5,500.  Yes, that is 1/10th of the price quoted by the other Hobart-based company. We can't really fathom the difference.

Needless to say, we have asked Southern Excavations to do the work. They are also going to "flatten out" an area near the house site and gravel it, so that the builders have somewhere close to the site to park their cars (and keep them off the road thereby reducing the annoyance caused to our new future neighbours).

Brian's crew have given us a tentative start date of around 4 March 2013 - which gives us enough time to let our future neighbours know that we will be disturbing their peace for about a week, and also that they will be able to help themselves to some logs for the winter as a result.

Viktoria has asked Neal-the-Architect to check in with Michael-the-Builder about his used of a preferred excavations contractor. If the one the builder was using was going to charge us over $50,000 for a driveway (which they didn't actually go to the site to see) which a local company could do for under $10,000, what would they be charging us to excavate the house pad?? Particularly as it will involve removal of rock. We would prefer that Southern Excavations be given the opportunity (and we get to keep more of the work local), but Neal will have to negotiate the political minefield for us first.

In the meantime, and closer to our present home, we are waiting results from the vet who is performing blood tests and xrays on an aging Captain Greatpants. He turned 14 a couple of weeks ago, and although he is showing signs of his age, we would love for him to share more of our lives for a bit longer. But his health and happiness come first, so we continue to await the phone call.

V&A

Fires, floods.... plague of locust?

In Queensland in December it was fire.

In Queensland in January it's floods.

While we currently live on a mountain therefore didn't get flooded (and if we  do ever flood, we will be talking water levels of biblical proportions) we didn't escape the storms.  

For three days and three nights we were battered by ceaseless cyclonic winds (officially clocked >125km/hr). We were left with no power from Australia Day (Saturday January 26th) until Friday 1^st February. And in the bush no power = no running water = no waste water system.

On Saturday 27th the phone lines went down too.

The view during the storm - not quite as effective without a sound track

Fortunately, we came through it all relatively unscathed - just the outdoor shade sails, the living room curtains (from horizontal rain coming in over the windows) and all the perishable food. We didn’t even try to kill each after being locked together with no power, no phone & no internet for 72 hours. The feline crew were in cat heaven as they had to eat tinned food (cat equivalent of McDonald's) for several days. 

The whole area's electrical system needs a rebuild.  Guy was saying on the radio that they sent a crew up the first night but they came straight back down as “trees were landing all around them”. Wusses.

The new water feature - oh wait, that's the front stairs

The Android managed to get up onto the roof Tuesday afternoon. Despite several ominous large bangs over the weekend, there wasn't a scratch on it. All the solar panels are intact & undamaged. 

Large sections of the mountain had blocked both roads , so we had to take the scenic route all week. The council had to put roadblocks up to stop non-residents - apparently there are a lot of “trauma tourists” wanting to get up to see the damage on the mountain.

Humans are weird.

We found an exhausted bird lying in the middle of the road on the way down to to work during the week - Viktoria made the Android stop so that we could pick it up (only a small tantrum). We took it to the vet. It’s apparently a juvenile Sooty Tern, which looks like it’s been blown all the way from the islands off the far north Queensland coast. Poor little thing. Fortunately, the vet have a specialist seabird carer to look after it (and a bedraggled pelican which arrived at the vet shortly before us). 

After a week of hauling water in buckets upstairs & taking cold sponge baths, we definitely want a header tank at the new Tasmanian place…