Outside Work January 2012

The previous blog shows the progress made during our recent holiday to the US.  The inside is coming along nice, but the outside is really coming along so I thought a few pictures would be fun to see.  First, here's a picture of the completed pump house (see the framing in the prior blog) along with the propane tank.  All the dogs are accompanying Bob when he took these pictures.

The next picture is taken from about the same spot the previous picture was taken.  THe first picture is looking to the northeast and the picture below is looking to the southwest.  You can see the new retaining wall that was just built in the foreground and the large planter near the porch.  In the middle, the "front yard" has been nicely leveled and a new Italian-style fountain placed in the middle of the front yard - our first bit of exterior decoration.

The following picture is taken from the far west corner of the porch - in the opening to the front yard you can see in the middle right of the picture above.  You can clearly see the new retaining wall, the leveled yard and the new fountain (along with the pump house, propane tank and electrical service.  You can see that we've aggregated all of our "utilities" in one area to make maintenance and other activities easier.

To get the gas and water lines from the propane tank and the pump house down to the barndominium, we had to dig some pretty serious trenches.  Heavy equipment will be running across this area from time to time as it's all along the easy side of the house where we plan to put the rain and grey water collection systems.  Thus, we wanted to bury the pipes 3-4' down.  Fortunately the land is pretty sandy so digging deep isn't much of a problem except for the large number of tree roots in the way.  Here's a picture of me and Dave installing the water pipes.

Finally, since we've been gone, we had someone come in and put more road base (a heavy clay base - required in this area since the soil in the area is so sandy that you need to put down a heavy road base material so vehicles don't sink in the sand) on the road, on the approach to the garages and the parking areas.  We had noticed this last trip that the previous road base had become a bit worn (quite a few heavy contstruction trucks caused that) and had sunk a bit into the sand so another god coating was in order.  Ultimately (once we're done with construction), we'll put other road base materials on the top of this base coat.  But until we're closer to being done, this material will be our road - kind of a orange-red color quite similar to the color you'll see in the red center of Australia.

This first picture is the approach area to the garages (west of the barndominium looking east).  This area had too much slope for my liking (especially to back the trailer in and out) so we had it built up and as you can see, it is much flatter now.

And here's a hot back toward the main road showing the additional material on the road.  This part of the road had gotten pretty "wavy" from the larger trucks bringing materials to the job site.

And one more good look back at the road and approach to the garages.  At gentle slope around the turn but it should be fine now assuming it all settles nicely in the rains of late winter and spring.