Bloody weather!

Wednesday 3 December 2014

On Tuesday 2 December 2014, our concreter and a bobcat operator started to clear and excavate the site in preparation for the laying of our new concrete driveway.  All being-well and weather-permitting, the new concrete driveway and paved areas will be laid on Tuesday 9 December 2014 (fingers crossed).  If we can stick to that timeframe, we should be able to drive our car onto the new driveway a week later on Tuesday 16 December 2014, and any heavy vehicles or delivery trucks can drive onto it 1½ weeks after it’s been laid.  We need to vacate the nearby rental property by no later than Friday 19 December 2014, so I’m a bit anxious about those timeframes.  We need to be ready to occupy the new home by no later than Friday 19 December 2014.

The company that laid the Anti-termite Kordon Barriers around the perimeter of the house’s concrete slab returned today (Wednesday 3 December 2014).  They laid the last remaining section of the Anti-termite Kordon Barrier to the front centre of the garage’s concrete slab.  That final Kordon Barrier has to be installed before the new concrete driveway is laid.

We’ve really been having problems with the weather this week.  This week our daily temperatures have consistently been very hot, at around 35⁰C (95⁰F), and we had a hot, humid day with 83% Humidity today.  Every day this week, from mid-morning until late afternoon, it’s just been too hot and too humid to be digging, scraping and clearing the yards (all that ‘hard yakka’), unless we want to keel-over with Heat Exhaustion and Sunstroke.  Then, every day, just as it’s cool enough to do that work in the late afternoon, we find ourselves dodging violent thunderstorms and torrential rain.  It’s almost ‘monsoonal’ in its timing every day.  That weather pattern is forecast to continue until Sunday/Monday.  Oh, great.  Then again, this is the first time we’ve really been hampered with bad weather throughout our Build.  Perhaps I shouldn’t complain.      

We were planning on hiring a motorised, heavy-duty, hydraulic rotary hoe to clear and scrape the backyard in preparation for the landscaping work that Pete and I are now going to do ourselves, before the concreter started his work.  That rotary hoe weighs 300kg (661lbs) and we can’t get it down the other side of the house.  Bugger!  I don’t think we can do that work just now without the risk of damaging the excavation work that the concreter did yesterday.  I don’t think wheeling a 300kg rotary hoe up/across that excavated area would be advisable now and we don’t have any thick timber or other stuff at hand to use as a suitable ramp.  Unfortunately we have very heavy clay subsoils here.  When it rains, the exposed clay areas become slippery and it’s easy to get stuck/bogged in the clay.  Maybe we should name the new house “The Somme”?  We’re praying for cooler weather so that we can get stuck into all the landscaping work.

I bought 8 of those Clean Step Mats (Super Absorbent Microfibre Doormats to trap dirt and water) on eBay the other day.  I saw them advertised on some TV Shopping Channel a while ago.  We got them today.  We’ll lay them near the main entrances of the new house to help stop the building dust, dirt, mud and clay getting walked-inside the new home.  I’m also hoping it will help in case we get 2 very dirty/muddy Staffies walking in and out.

Presently, I have an elderly, widowed, mother (84 years old) who has been in hospital for some 3 weeks now, recovering from a recent illness and poor health.  We’re hoping her health improves sufficiently enough for her to be discharged home from hospital to her place, or ours, within the next few weeks.  There’s a lot of priorities to anxiously juggle and contend with at the moment.