Our forth year on the land (blog)
Building started[edit] |
| Posted by Nad on 16 February 2016 at 19:53 |
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This post has the following tags: Our forth year on the land
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| The concrete has only been drying for four days, but we figured as long as were careful it should be ok! So we cut three 2.7m pieces of 5x12.5 (eucalyptus comes in 5.4m lengths instead of the usual 2.7m) and drilled the holes to bolt them on. Even though I made a guide (I drilled a hole through a thick piece of wood with the drill press) to try and ensure the holes were vertical, it wasn't very accurate because the wood isn't cut very well - not only is it really bent, but it's not very square either! We had to stop early though because it started raining during our picnic break! - the house was already able to shelter us from the rain though by putting a few roofing panels over one end of the foundation :-)
We took the generator with us to the work area in a wheelbarrow so we can use power tools for cutting and drilling, but it's only powerful enough to run a jig-saw not a circular saw (although we have to test that as a lot of people think that it should run one no problem). Unfortunately the jig-saw isn't strong enough to cut the thick pieces of eucalyptus, so we have to use the slightly less accurate chain-saw for those cuts! 
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Foundation poles complete[edit] |
| Posted by Nad on 12 February 2016 at 21:57 |
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This post has the following tags: Our forth year on the land
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| We completed the foundations poles today, our third day back at the land. We wanted to get these done really early since we have to leave them for a week so the concrete is hard enough before we start putting heavy wood on top of them and hammering it. We made six foundations poles using PVC pipe filled with concrete as shown in the first image below.
Unfortunately the south-east (closest to Vladimirs place) and the north-west poles have no reinforcing - because we completely forgot about it! And the middle pipe on the south side goes all the way to the bottom of the hole, but apart from those problems all went well. We used 75Kg of cement, 150kg of sand and an extra 50kg of large stones. The cement is pretty bad quality as it's a couple of years old, and the sand too is from the river containing a fair bit of mud, so this concrete wouldn't be suitable for structure, but hopefully it'll be fine for foundations where the force is almost all downwards and it's contained within the PVC pipe to prevent it from bending if any cracks were to form in it. Here's a picture of the completed foundation pipes and one of Beth clearing a path through the overgrown bracken from the newly delivered materials to the work area. If you click on the picture to get a bigger view you can just make out the wood and the new power pole in the distance at the end of the cleared path. 
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Wood arrived for our second house[edit] |
| Posted by Nad on 11 February 2016 at 21:40 |
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This post has the following tags: Our forth year on the land
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We took the hire car back to Canela today and then paid for all the materials for the new house which came to R$3,500 (about NZ$1,300), most of the wood is eucalyptus this time rather than pine as it's stronger and more resistant to bugs. Delivery was only about R$150 which is a really awesome price, normally it's 2-3 times more than that, but since this wood place has it's own trucks they can do a better deal. We got a ride back to the land in the truck with them.
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Starting our second house[edit] |
| Posted by Nad on 11 February 2016 at 00:07 |
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This post has the following tags: Our forth year on the land
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| We made a start on the foundations for the new house today. The wood hasn't arrived yet, but we had some cold concrete and large PVC pipes lying round which we could use to get started on the foundations. We decided to use concrete and PVC instead of logs for the foundations this time to make it more bug resistant.
We only got two of the six done though as there was a lot of weed-eating to do to clear the area and clear a path to it for the truck, and we had to make a gate in the fence to let the truck through - but not the cows! 
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Starting our forth year on the land[edit] |
| Posted by Nad on 9 February 2016 at 13:20 |
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| Our third year on the land |
| Wow that year sped past in a flash! We've just got back from BrasÃlia where we stayed with Beth's parents for a couple of months for Christmas and New Years. It's always good to catch up with the family and spend time with them, but we have to remember in future not to be away from our land for too long because we start really missing the peace and tranquillity of have natural forest all around us. We have another three months away soon too because we're visiting New Zealand, but after we get back we plan on spending some really solid time here!
One interesting thing that we did in BrasÃlia was to do some bike Mechanic lessons with Beth's friend Danielson. This was mainly for Beth because she felt very unconfident about fixing anything mechanically on the bikes, but it's made me more confident too because there were some things I didn't really understand too such as the gear adjustment mechanism. He took us through assembling a bike completely from scratch and now Beth feels really confident to fix anything on our bikes :-) 
Remember the Habanero source that was too hot to handle? Well shortly after it was made I put two olives in the bottle, one for me and one for Beth's dad, the challenge was that on the last day of out visit, we would both eat one of the olives! Well I ate mine, but Beth's dad cheated and spat his out!!! It was pretty hot, but luckily we had ensured that we had some ice cold beer in the freezer to cool off with :-) 
We caught a plane back to Porto Alegre a couple of days ago, stayed in a hotel there then got a bus to Canela where we hired a car which we'll use for a few days while we get supplies and arrange building materials. We have to build a house over the next few weeks since they won't connect the power to our new pole unless there's a house within 40m of it (and they didn't want to put our pole close to our current house because they thought the truck would get stuck in the mud). When we arrived, every thing was really overgrown as usual, but amongst all the tangle of weeds we found heaps of ripe tomatoes and some grapes are ready too :-) The mulberry trees that had died from the intense surprise frost last year have regrown to the size they were before, and the banana tree is looking really good too - the tiny one that cropped up next to it is pretty big now as well! 
The strangest thing we saw when we arrived though was that a pumpkin vine had travelled all the way out of the vege patch straight to our door as if it specifically wanted to visit us in our house! Perhaps this is the way that home delivery works in the wild :-) 
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