Category Archives: salvaging

Freecycle, garden, moving out, salvaging

Reuse, Recycle and Pack

We are working in the garden again.  Pulling things out, storing them for later when we move back in after the build.  Some of the plants have been in pots for two years – they have all been re-potted to keep them going.  Hopefully only another 12 months.

100s of pavers have been lifted, even the little man has been working had on those.  His dump truck has been doing some hard work up and down the back yard.

We’ve also sold (ebay) and given away (freecycle) many unwanted things, such as old toys and appliances.  The local charity bins are also benefiting from our clean out.  Although it has been a bit traumatic for the little man 🙁 .

Space Bags have become my new best friend!

The pace is still slow, but moving in the right direction. 🙂

 

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builders, building, Freecycle, garden, history, preliminary tender, salvaging, site visit

A Site Visit and Freecycling

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On Friday we had a site visit with our builder’s Project Manager (well he will be if we go ahead wit the contract) and it all went very well.  We walked through the back of the block and agreed on what areas of the back yard we needed to keep clear for access to storm water and sewerage and where we could put the security fence and all the gardening materials that we are going to salvage.  He had no issues with us coming on site to access our stuff, and encouraged us to come and site and check out the building progress.  We do need to move all those stones (argh!) and the water tank, but at least we know where to put to them now.  Interestingly, we asked him about the tree root protection and he said he could see no obvious reason why we would need it, so was going to follow it up for us.  So at this point things are looking up, although do we have quite a few other issues still outstanding.

 


 

We have also discovered the Freecycle Network.  Its a place where you can give away and get stuff for free.  There are no fees, its completely grass roots and non-profit and everything is free.  I have already given loads of stuff to the Op Shop, but didn’t know what to do with 2 potted palms that we have, which really don’t fit with the rest of our garden.  I’d read about freecycle in one of the local weekly papers and thought I’d check it out.  I posted the palms last night and by this morning I had a taker, so much better that just throwing them out.

 

 

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building contract, garden, history, preliminary tender, salvaging

Stones, Stones and Headaches

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We started pulling our garden apart about 6 weeks ago – saving plants and shifting stones from our front yard to the back yard to be stored.    The last 4 weekends hubby has put in a big effort to get all the stones shifted (the plants are my job) and he finally finished last weekend.  Our front yard now looks like this:

And in the backyard, Dermie has some company:

We were pretty please with our efforts until an email arrived from our design consultant on Tuesday.  During our review of the preliminary tender we had advised him that we would be fencing off the back section of the yard for security as we were using it for storage.    This was included in our list of amendments/questions.  In the response sent back by the design consultant was the following:

“Please note that the services will be running to the back of the block behind the Garage so access will be required. Due to these services being dug along the rear of the old Garage Builder cannot guarantee that the Garage footings won’t be affected.”

Why was this not in the preliminary tender document?  The pipe for the services is shown going behind the garage, but there is no mention of requiring access to that area, or of the potential damage to the garage footings, or that the water tank needs to be removed.  In fact the water tank isn’t even shown on the site plan!  Something that didn’t seem important at the time, since there was no mention of us needing to clear that area.

Its better that we found out now rather than during construction, however it highlights one of our frustrations with this builder.  We are building on an established site and have no intention of clearing the entire site.  Our design consultant hasn’t visited the site, the builder hasn’t visited the site, and the engineering company who have visited the site haven’t spoken to us about our requirements.  We asked our design consultant if the builder could come and walk us through the site so we could better understand how much of the site needs to be cleared, but we were told that this won’t happen until after the contract is signed.

Given what has happened now, we think its even more important that we get the builder here, agree with the builder how much of the site will be cleared and what access both parties need to the site and document that in the contract.  We don’t think that is unreasonable.  In fact, it seems bizarre to sign a contract with someone who hasn’t even set foot on our site.


 

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