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