Plans approved!!!

I know it's been a long time since the last blog entry, but things have been moving slowly while we waited for the house plans to finish being drawn up and then for the council to approve them. We were expecting to get approval around late February, but yesterday the approval arrived in the mail, taking less than a month! Goulburn Mulwaree Council, you ROCK! So the next step is to finish getting concreting and plumbing quotes so that we can proceed with the slab.

I've also recommenced talks with the road building company so that we can get our road in before the concrete trucks arrive. It's about 450m from the front gate to the garage door, plus we'll get about 30m of the spur road to the stables done so that trucks have got an area to turn around in.

You should start to see a more frequent posts as things happen, especially once I actually start on the frame when it should be every day or so.

In other news, it hasn't been completely quiet. We bought a tractor before Christmas and I've been hard at it slashing the front paddock ever since, finally finishing last Saturday. We got some other implements as well such as a backhoe, box scraper and front end loader so it'll have plenty of work to do forever more I think.

I also put up a roundyard for Sarah to train her horses in, supplied by the good people from the Australian Stockyard Company in Goulburn. High school mathematics finally came in handy allowing me to calculate the radius and actually make it a roundyard rather than something roughly the shape of a walrus.

Okay, I guess I should put in a few words about the ponies as for some unfathomable reason some of you can't seem to get enough of them. For those who haven't met them before we have three Highland Ponies, the beginnings of our breeding stud.

The Three Stooges

Currie Park Akira

Akira was the first of our new herd, born at Currie Park in Western Australia in 2003. She has won many Champion and Supreme Champion awards in both Highland Pony classes and Buckskin/Dun Dilute classes. Sarah started her under saddle herself and has begun competing on her in dressage events.

Last November Sarah took Akira to Tonimbuk, Victoria, where she was served by the newly imported Highland stallion Fourmerk Royal Scott and is due to foal in November 2009 with Tarabrae's first foal.

Currie Park Kilbride (Bridie)

Bridie joined us in 2007 from the same stud in Western Australia at about the same time that we came onto the land, travelling over to NSW with Akira. Bridie is Akira's half sister, both by the imported stallion Maverickdene. In the last few months Bridie has been competing successfully as a two year old in various breed classes. She recently won Champion in a mixed APSB category at the Bungendore Show. We plan to put her in foal to Fyfedene at the end of 2009 after Sarah starts her under saddle.

Bridie was recently disappointed to discover that I had electrified the fence behind the shed as she had been doing her best to dismantle it. She once tried to dismantle the whole shed and all of its contents when she snuck in one day after the electrician left the door open. She is known locally as Destructor. (Sarah wants me to add that Dana also holds that title but Dana is a big girl now - she turned 2 last Saturday - and doesn't do such childish things any more.)

Croft Cnoc Finella (Fin)

Fin is the most recent addition to the Tarabrae herd, arriving in February 2008 from Croft Cnoc in Victoria and is 4 years old. Sarah has recently started her under saddle making good use of the round yard, and plans to compete in dressage with her this year.

Fin likes to play with toys and eat the duco off cars and motorbikes. Since being confined to a paddock without vehicles to chew on she now has a ball that hangs from a tree and also enjoys tormenting the dogs by stealing and playing with their toys.

Okay, that's all for now. The next entry will be when work starts on site so stay tuned!

Dams filling up fast

After 24mm of rain in the last few days, and good rains since they were constructed, our two dams are filling up fast. I'd say they are about a third full right now, and that by itself is the equivalent of an Olympic swimming pool of water. The water is still an opaque clay colour but I'm hoping it'll settle out before we are ready to use it otherwise we may have to consider adding a substance to bind with the clay and make it settle.

In other news Sarah and I visited a house that had been built in the same design as the one we selected, kindly opened for the purpose by the owners and organised by our kit home company PAAL. It was a fantastic opportunity and we gained a better perspective on the actual space inside the house and picked up a few good ideas from the owners. The only disappointment was that they didn't actually build it themselves (employed a local builder to put it up) so I wasn't able to get any technical tips. Maybe I'll set up an online forum so that we can swap building tips with other owner builders.

On the upside, owner Ken had the exact same make and model of tractor that I intend to buy, bought from the same place and with several of the same implements, so it was good to get a look at that ahead of time. We are going to the Field Day in Murrumbateman this weekend and plan to put our order in then.

And if you thought all that was good, we took the Hilux through Swallow Tail Pass on the way home - not super challenging but the most 4x4ing the Hilux has done so far (Rav4s should stay home though), and it was topped off by a beer and a toasted sanger at the Taralga Hotel.

Life is good.

Ponies Fenced In

Well, I finally finished building a new fence to contain the ponies, restricting them to about about six hectares (15 acres) of our 40 hectare (100 acre) property. They weren't too pleased about it but they'll get over it. I have plans to further subdivide that paddock too one day, to help control grazing, so they'd better.

The fence was about 450 metres and forms two sides of the paddock, with another side formed by the boundary with our neighbours Matt and Sue, and the fourth side is actually the small (1 hectare) paddock I built last year, with a new gate installed to allow the ponies to use the trees for shelter and access the water troughs in the same place as always. It includes eight new strainer posts, twelve new stays, over 100 star pickets, and two new gates. Next step is to electrify it!

On Saturday I set out the house position again, as accurately as I could, on the newly leveled site. We have settled on the design for the house now and are in the process of getting the deposit to the kit company. With a bit of luck we'll be pouring the slab before Christmas. Sarah and I also adjusted the driveway position slightly so that it meanders through the trees as it winds past the house out to the stable site.

Dams Built and House Site Levelled

With our house in Perth now sold we could afford to get our dam built, hopefully in time for the winter rains. With the bulldozer on site and on the job it seemed to make sense to get a few other things done too, so we got our earthworks contractor Frank Gardiner to level the house site and the stable site, and build us another small dam close to the house and stable. The second dam will be used as a holding reservoir to distribute water to the stable and to water troughs in the paddocks. Frank did an excellent job. If you're after earthworks in the Goulburn area I'd be happy to put you on to him. Check out the photos via the links on the right.

Now we just need some rain to fill them up!

The Story So Far

June 25, 2007: Sarah and I set foot on our 100 acre property near Canberra for the first time as the owners. It's been raining all month and the paddocks are sodden and we promptly bog the Hilux down to the axles. Digging her out while its still drizzling and with an air temperature of three degrees celcius isn't the most pleasant start to our life on the land, but we take it as a good omen as the area has been in the grip of a severe drought and the town dams are almost empty. Now they're overflowing.

And, things could only get better.

The property is part of a rural subdivision, a former sheep property in the NSW Southern Tablelands. Our portion of it, soon to become known as Tarabrae, sports a set of abandoned sheep yards at least fifty years old as the only man made structure on the property, apart from a rickety old fence line that skews off at an angle that makes sense only to its original builder. The sheep yards are still quite sturdy, except one corner which has been knocked down by the developers when they came through with their roads and fences and powerlines. Nonetheless we quickly earmarked the central pen as suitable for use as a dog pen. The rest of it we started knocking down with a view to reusing the materials.

Our first few weeks was spent living in the caravan we bought when we arrived, out in the open. Power was supplied by a generator (with remote control!) and water came from barrels. Sarah started work in Canberra after the first week so was able to shower at work in the mornings. I had to content myself with an occasional $4 shower at the pub, or if it was a sunny day and the air temp got above 10 degrees I might brave the outdoor shower, heating the water in the kettle. It wasn't the best time of year to be roughing it. Some nights it got so cold that even the fridge complained - screaming until I turned it off. In the morning the gas lines would be frozen so I couldn't even have a cuppa until it warmed up.

By mid August our shed had been built and we could start moving everything in and spread out a bit. The caravan came in too and took up the main task of being the bedroom. We built a kitchen and bathroom in the shed with running water (now supplied by a tank collecting rainwater from the roof), eventually filling it with all the mod-cons including microwave, dishwasher and clothes washer. The bathroom got an instantaneous gas hot water system so we could finally shower at home.

Our trusty eBay generator worked hard for several months but eventually we got mains power. I just wish someone had told me beforehand that I would have to fork out $20,000 for a transformer!

The other major task I did last year was fencing. The perimeter fencing needed upgrading and I built a big fence right across the guts of the property, from scratch. I also built a one hectare paddock behind the shed that the horses could be locked into if necessary. At the end of August I had to go back to Perth for three months, leaving Sarah to cope on her own. But I also had to finish that fencing job, and on the afternoon before I flew back to Perth I still han't finished. So, after a lovely dinner with our friendly neighbours I promptly went back to work in the paddock, finishing about 7am the next morning - just enough time for a wash before heading to the airport.

In December I was back and started my new job in Canberra, and we've been living here happily ever since. We have plans to build a house when we can afford it, hopefully later this year (2008). It will be a kit home that I plan to build myself, employing tradies where necessary. I intend for this blog site to show detailed progress. We've already started on the earthworks which I'll talk about in the next entry, with pictures.

Stay tuned!