Rain… We do it quite well in the Adelaide Hills, in fact we may have even been out doing our selves recently.
The Bureau of Meteorology has predicted a wetter than average winter and we are definitely on track. In a farming community it can be very important when it does and doesn’t rain so you have to be mindful of whom you say what to when. Very quietly I really wish it would go away for a while, at least until the house is weather tight.
In the past few weeks we have had three significant rain events, +70mm and are working our way into another one. The ground in sodden so anything that lands now is running off to fill creeks and dams around the area. Until a couple of weekends ago where a bit of handy shovel work set us right it was also filling the area around our house. Even with our new and improved drainage it’s still nothing but shoe stealing mud for several meters around the edge.
Our winter’s creek or ‘beck’, an old English word recently discovered to me, is flowing swiftly and making me wish I had used some of the finer weather to shore up our track crossing. If it’s still there when the next string of fine weather finally happens to line up with a weekend I might have to do something about it.
The brickwork has been progressing although slowly. Apparently because the bricks we have used are so hard fired, translation, ‘crispy fried’, they don’t absorb any moisture from the mortar and cannot be laid when wet. If they are laid wet, the layer of water on the outside causes the brick to ‘swim’, sliding out of alignment and the mortar slumps. As testament to this the brickie tried powering through one day and ended up having to pull it back down. Now in winter with precious few fine days, we have to waste half of them waiting for the bricks to dry out. This is all in stark contrast to many standard bricks which are so absorbent they must be wet before being laid.
We are meant to, fingers crossed, touch wood, whatever takes your fancy, have a few days of fine weather coming up. The brickie thinks with decent weather he should be done this week and after yesterday’s failed steel work installation, rain again; some fine weather would be much appreciated.
Yesterday I was home to watch the steel being installed. Like pouring the slab or putting the roof on it is one of the big events during the construction of the house. In some senses it feels like the house is the real deal now we have some steel in it. But…it rained. After a string of nice clear days with the ground finally dry enough to work on it rained. It rained the night before hand and right through to lunchtime. The crane driver was sick so the steel workers brought a hired cherry picker. The cherry picker weighed a tonne and a half and had skinny, what some might call pizza cutter wheels. This all culminated in bogged.
It was lucky I was home because I had to use the tractor to pull the cherry picker out which then almost bogged the tractor for my efforts. In the end we needed a combination of five pushing and a tow chain hooked up to the tractor on safe ground. As far as things go this is not too bad. A couple of weeks ago on a neighbors property I watched tandem tractors with a hundred meters of tow chain pulling out a Land Cruiser that was bogged up to the ‘top’ of its front wheel. That took them all day, we only lost an hour but with only one column half installed it was not the day off I had hoped for.
It is now quite timely that the trusty earth workers were back today to banish the mud with a layer of rubble around the house. In fact at this stage the build cannot proceed without it.