Monthly Archives: May 2020

New Shed

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It’s almost 5 months since the catastrophic fire that cleaned us up and changed our life forever.Shit has Happened!Next!  So Let’s move on.
Get over it. We have to get on with being in the here and now. The new normal will now be massive fires at intervals set by the new hotter climate. We need to acknowlege this, internalise it and re-build appropriately. We have decided to re-construct eveything in Steel frame and steel cladding. This won’t eliminate the risk or reduce the wild-fire exposure, but when the fire returns – eventually, as it will, in the next catastrophic event,  we will be better prepared with buildings that are less likely to burn. Our first attempt at building something new – a car port. A galvanised steel structure, is now complete. The council has been out here to inspect it and given the final approval and ticked it off. We have had the solar electricians out here this week and installed the 6.6 kw of solar PV on its roof. So we are not buying any of the ‘green’ wind power from the grid any more. We are now back to using our own self-generated solar power.  It has taken 5 months to get back here. It’s a nice feeling to be getting back to self reliance in electricity and food. We decided to use re-cycled galvanised iron to clad the new building.

It makes the rather bright looking new building a lot less shocking. It blends in with the charachter of all the other buildings on the site. The inside is still rather bright, a bit ‘2001- a shed oddesy’, but I intend to line it in times to come when funds and time permit. That will tone it down a bit.


Because my leg is still healing. I can’t do too much – especially on ladders and up on roofs. So I have been grounding myself with working on the stone stairs leading up the retaining wall to the new pottery. These stairs will link the new pottery to the wood kiln shed below.I have found a lot of my stomemasons tools that went through the fire. Luckily, being mostly wrought iron, thay survived the fire in reasonable order, just very rusty.I have enough ‘gads’ to be getting on with, so I can cut up the big stone slabs into smaller sizes more suited to stone step treads in a set of steps.I’m not up to lifting big lumps like this anymore, so I’m using the tractor’s bucket to do the heavy lifting these days.


The weather is holding out, only a few frosts as yet, so we are still harvesting all our green food from the garden. We are making a lot of stir-frys at the moment. Ones that use a lot of capsicums! We make a big double batch and make gyoza dumplings from half, then stuff capsicums the next night with the rest.




It’s a tough life, but someone has to live it 🙂

Small Steps

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Every big project is composed of many small steps. This week we took a few more small steps on the way to the completion of the bigger picture.We got our 2nd semi-trailer load of stone blocks. We are now almost finished building the retaining wall, and back filling. Tomorrow, I’m expecting the the last few truck loads of crushed rock dust. While we wait. I have been digging down to re-expose the old 3 phase cables and conduits. It requires digging down where I think that the cables ought to be, sometimes it’s there and other times it isn’t. I have spent a lot of time digging in the wrong places. I eventually find them, it’s just a matter of time. I remember where they used to run. After-all. It was me who burried them, but it was 30 years ago and the landscape here on this block is now completely different since the fire, without buildings, fences, trees, and other reference points. I found this one;

And these two, where they crossed over. Once found, it is a matter of digging all along the edge of the conduit, exposing it on the side, so that it can be pulled out of the embedded soil and out into the open trench.


I want to expose and re-use all the old wiring. There are 3 lines down to the old pottery site. The original single phase line, the newer 3 phase line and the solar power line. Installing new wiring and conduit is very expensive. I just had to pay $400 for just 25 metres of 16mm copper cable to do a short extension. Copper is so expensive these days. That makes the original cabling that I have spent the week digging out, worth about $5,000, and that doesn’t include the value of the 40mm. conduit and the cost of digging the trenches. Then there is the electricians service fees/labour costs. As the site is about 70 metres from the power box up at the street, I estimate that I have saved myself  $30,000 all up. I paid $5,000+ for the initial 3 phase line in 1998. Things have gone up since then!



Tragically, as I was just threading the new copper cables through the new conduit. I went to step over the trench, lost my footing , as the side wall collapsed. I went down with the cable. I fell in, twisting my leg as I went down. I ended up back to front, but my leg didn’t follow. I twisted my leg right around. I thought that I had broken my leg at first, just looking at it all the wrong way around, I went into shock. I couldn’t feel my foot, but slowly came to realise that I could still move it OK. It is just very painful to move it. I had to crawl, limp and shuffle back to the house with Janine’s help. I went to bed. I couldn’t do anything else. I didn’t have the energy or motivation to do anything else.Today I’m very sore, but can limp around, we had booked the excavator to come back, so had to be out there to organise things, but didn’t do very much at all.
I can see that this will take some time to heal. it’ll slow me down somewhat.

Now I’m taking very small steps!

Very Slowly.