Roselea

Author: Shaun

  • Swimming Lane is Next to do

    We have decided to start building the swimming lane first before the main house, because we had a serious problem with rain water this week, when we had very heavy rain falls gushing off the neighbours workshop and garage grounds.

    So we are building a steel reinforced heavy duty block wall nearest the fence, this being the back wall of the swimming lane. Then we can rebuild the soil back up again to stabilised the ground so we can repair the fence itself too.

    So the foundation is a 100mm thick concrete slab, set at the 9.200metre point (800mm below the nominal ground level), the first part of the wall will be made using 215mm wide concrete hollow blocks with steel 10mm reinforcing bars through all the holes and then ready mix concrete poured into each column to lock everything together.

    The back wall is 6 blocks high (215mm each equals 1350mm high including mortar joints), which will put us above our ground level but still 500mm (at least!) below the neighbour’s soil level. For this, we will put another two layers of blocks but only using the narrower (140mm wide) hollow blocks because there is less weight and load of soil and also at this point, there is a “return” channel for the water to flow back down to the beginning and circulate around through the swimming lane. This is our natural filtration system for cleaning the water, using lots of water plants.

  • Rain Washes Fence and Shoring Panels Down!

    We had a bit of a disaster today when the rain came and came and came! It was one of those 10 year events of massive amount of water over hours and hours of rain, rain, rain!

    We weren’t actually flooded out, nor anywhere near that point (ever since we have installed a whole line of Aquacell crates in front of our temporary living and storage buildings!), it just came up a few inches to create a shallow lake which disappeared fairly quickly, thanks for those aforementioned Aquacell modules underground!!

    We are situated next to a garage mechanic workshop and car showroom, and their land is higher up than us (a good 4 feet!), and it slopes slightly downhill towards us too!! This means that we get some rain water flowing into our garden, but this turned into a gushing river during the heavy thunderstorm deluge and it ate the soil and dirt away from the concrete posts of the fence and our shoring panels!! The fence collapsed and our soil retaining wall broke under the strain of water logged soil. Our long trench hole we removed ready for the swimming lane, was filled with a slurry of soil and sand!!

    Rain-and-soil-filled-trench

    Rain-and-soil-filled-trench

    Rain-poured-in-here

    Rain-poured-in-here

    Collapsed-fence

    Collapsed-fence

    Broken-shuttering

    Broken-shuttering


    We now have a foot deep of water along the whole length of our swimming lane and yes we wanted to have water in our swimming lane but just not right now!!

  • Clean Up Chore is Done At Last!

    We have finally finished sieving the soil, moved the “clean” dirt (huh!) to Mount Sod, and filled 5 large (6cubic yard) skips of rubbish!!

  • The Massive Soil Works starts …

    We start the huge task of sorting out the site, ready for the main house to be built upon!

    The soil is a real mess of old garden rubbish, DIY waste and building rubble from the old little cottage, as well as old metal pipes used back in the days when the whole area was a market gardens plus clay sewage pipes running back and forth too!

    We built a large sieve measuring 3feet by 2feet, with an electric powerful off-centre motor (taken from a plate ground compactor) to provide the shake and wiggle. this was mounted into a wooden rramework to hang over the top of the dumper truck to collect the “clean” dirt, to be taken away and tipped onto the mound of soil. The framework was then mounted on to the back of a large flat bed trollet to provide a collecting point for the rubbish and dumped into “ton bags”. These bags were lifted out when full and emptied into the skip.

  • Tidying Up site

    We have been tidying up the whole site ready for the start of phase 3 – the construction of the main house. The site clearance operation has been seeing various old piles of bricks (clay house bricks) being moved and soon the plants too!

    We will have a bonfire to get rid of materials like old shelving which got damaged in the rain, chopped branches and other garden rubbish.

    then the old compost heap will be spread across the whole garden to mix it well before the whole area is shoved up onto the mountain of dirt to clear away the top soil and get down to the sand.

  • Octagonal Flower Bed finished!

    The new raised Flower Bed is finally completed today. The Octagonal shaped constructed of dry bricks (without cement), a mixture of concrete driveway bricks and standard clay bricks. There are 7 layers all together.

    It is about 10 square metre of bedding, surrounding the lid of the spectic tank and air vent pipe.

    This flower bed is a temporary construction to rescue various plants from around the whole site before they were ruined by phase 3 – the contstruction of the main house!

  • Roof Repair on Store room

    We took the opportunity to put on a new roof covering on our store room this weekend. It was lovely weather and quite calm thus avoiding the problem of 10metres of roofing felt being blown about!

    We bought 5 new rolls of the cheapest roofing garden felt and 3 tins of glue. but after all we only needed one of the new tin as we had an old tin almost full!
    We will get our money back on the other two tins!

    Everything looks good now and hopefully this will be the last time we have to put on a new covering – on either roof!

  • Timber, Timber and Timber!

    All the timber from the Old Place has been cleared up and chucked into one huge pile!

    One day there will be .. one enormous bonfire! We will burn up most of the wood but some of it is in good condition and will keep ready for future use.

    All that remains is the chimney and a collection of bricks piles scattered around in the footprint of the once standing proud Old Place!

    We will now clear up the rubble and old paths and old floor slabs.

  • House Demolition Party

    Today we had a party! We invited all our nearby family to come and have fun demolishing the Old Place!

    We had six extra people here, all making great efforts in helping us break apart the wooden shell of the Old Place!



    We calculated that today’s multi man & woman workforce, probably saved us at least 20 days, if not 30 days of effort! We really thank all our family for their fabulous effort in helping us!

    The only thing left standing is the chimney! We will tidying up the last remaining planks of wood and rubble and have a “nice” scene of the chimney standing all by itself!

  • Hazardous Asbestos Panels all in Skip

    Today we have finally got all the cement panels with the asbestos, from the Old Place and all corners of the garden loaded into the skip we hired last Thursday.

    We had calculated that we have about 1.5 cubic metres of of the stuff, which nearly filled the skip. Right up to the top. The skip is the biggest one they do! It is the effect of the layers and the difficulty in avoiding uneven placements of the thousands of pieces!

    That is the last of the asbestos problem. At last!