Roselea

Blog

  • Indoor Jobs – Wet Weather

    Today we were working indoors to get out of the wet weather. We tidied up the workshop and re-assembled an old work bench. It is 12 feet long and 3 feet wide! It has loads of storage space underneath so it is now much neater and easier to get to our stuff!

    We did rush out between rain showers to pick up all 100 concrete blocks to move them over to where our tunnel and chimney will be and also moved the 40 6m pipes. We did this to make room for the soil heaps which will be generated when we dig out the huge trench!

  • Roof Repair!

    We decided to repair our temporary storage come accommodation’s roof. The wooden building is over 8 years old so the original roofing felt is cracking up! We had the job on our list of things to do and since we were waiting for our building control to approve our plan B in installing our Earth Tubes so we did the repair job instead!

    We got the cheapest felt money can buy and a couple of tin of black sticky glue and got up on the roof! No Nails this time and new felt straight on top of old! It only has to last a couple of more years!

    On the Roof – Monday 9th August

  • Earth Tubes Approval

    We had a flying visit from our Building Control inspector and we had a quick talk about the need to make sure the ground under and around the garage will be compacted very carefully to minimise settling effects. He was reassured that our garage slab is going to be 150mm thick and will have fibre reinforcement added. So we can now get on with the massive task of digging a large hole!

  • Collapsing trenches

    We started to dig the first trench for the earth tubes and as soon as it was full depth the walls started to collapse, a large chunk from the right and a smaller section on the left.

    first trench
    shows the collapsed side of the trench
    As we were planning to work at the bottom of these trenches this is a bit of problem… When we dug out the leach field the sides of the hole stayed put for a week and more!

    I think we will have to think of another way to do the earth tubes…

  • Garage Site Clearance Review

    The footprint of the garage and driveway has been cleared. The top soil was removed (about 300mm, a foot) and dumped on the heap which we are now calling Mount Sod! A big heap of earth

    Yes it is getting big! We found a old buried rubbish pile containing bones (small ones! Animal ones probably pig), very rusty tin cans, broken glass whatevers and other odds and ends!

    We had nice weather (tongue in cheek) on Monday with hail, thunder and lightning! The rain fall was over 11mm in just 20minutes! The lake formed with water off the roof of our shed and water coming down the Loke. We are calling it Lake Puddle! The lake of water after the thunderstorm on August 1st

  • Earth Tubes Day 1

    The deepest job so far and probably ever, is installing the Earth Tubes! We want these to be buried as deep as possible to take advantage of the cool and almost constant thermal storage of the “earth” at those depths!

    Day 1 – Friday 6th August

    Marking out all the trench lines by banging in 25 stakes around the outside to form a cat cradle pattern!!

    The strings showing where the earth tubes will go

  • Garage site clearance Day 4 & 5

    Day 4 – Thursday 5th August

    Started the day by doing a repair on the digger which I had been meaning to do for ages. The switch which allows the boom to be swiveled side to side relative to the cab hasn’t worked for ages. Fixed it but it took hours… Then back to the soil moving.

    Oops! I bent the wheelbarrow which was leaning against the bank (the boundary between us and school) and backed the dumper truck into it!

    Day 5 – Friday 6th August

    Last bit of soil removal and a bit of a tidy up. Then we could start marking out where the earth tube tenches will go. 25 stakes later a cats cradle was born…

  • Mini Digger & Dumper truck Maintenance

    Stephen spend the morning doing the regular maintenance, pumping grease into the joints and bearings including doing the dumper truck as well. But Stephen decided to tackle the longer running non working sideways control of the arm which we will need when we start digging the trenches. He traced the wiring from the switch on top of the joystick and to the solenoid that operates the pump that controls the rotation of the arm side to side. It was another similar problem with a power interruption to the switch so he repaired it with a clean new wire. It now works!!

  • Garage site clearance Day 2 & 3

    Started moving the top soil to our spoil heap at the top of the garden. Just load and dump over and over again…

    Day 2 – Tuesday 3rd August

    Day 3 – Wednesday 4th August

  • Garage site clearance Day 1

    The next job is to clear the area for the garage, earth tubes, rainwater tanks and soak away. We need to remove the top soil over the area from the fence to the loke.

    Day 1 – Monday 2nd August

    Remove  paving slabs from in front of the old shed doors. Then at 12:30 Rain stopped play (oops I mean Work!), a nice summer thunderstorm of rain and hail which droped 11mm of rain in 15 minutes! Then the rain set in for the rest of the day…