autumn hews

Still waiting to hear from my engineers so I cut out a couple of other small wall sections and had a play with Photoshop to help visualise the end product.

The central column below will eventually be removed:

Looking towards kitchen and bathroom entry:(click to enlarge)

Paul also finished turning the soil in the garden and then went off and collected two big bags of cow poo to help condition the soil and has already planted garlic ready for Spring. He's donating about 6 rhubarb plants to me which will be planted in a couple of months.

All the wet weather recently has also slowed things a little, but at least the place will be green again in a week or so!

on the fence

Back to the garden fence today. It measures 12m X 5m - so 60 sqm of space. That's 2/3 the size of my current 2 B/R flat!!

First the second layer of hinge joint fencing wire:

Then the chicken wire:

All finished - ready to start preparing the soil so planting can begin in early spring (September).
Also I want to make three compost bays using some of the steel panels cut out of the container walls.

I wish I had discovered this gadget a couple of days ago - a netting clip tool:
 

It made attaching the chicken wire so easy. The last couple of days I have been cutting and twisting short lengths of binding wire with pliers and my hands are a mess!

The only issue with these little clips is getting them out of the bag individually:

Sort of reminds me of:

poor support

And so ...yet another hold up because of problems with my engineering plans.

This is the third set of problems since they were issued to me.

Perhaps I am at fault in part for not having checked them thoroughly enough when I first received them, but when you pay someone $4,000 to do a job you sort of expect them to do it right the first time.

This new issue concerns the steel support posts inside the house which help ease the stress from removed walls.

The engineer plans specify attaching plates from the support posts to the parallel flange channel (PFC) that runs along the top of the container.

Unfortunately a container doesn't have an upper PFC. They are only along the bottom of the container.

It takes 5 minutes to Google shipping container construction to find that out.

So now I am waiting for them to answer my email requesting an updated set of plans that address the problem.

In the meantime I have started to establish the veggy garden. On Paul's last visit he chose the position due to the quality of the topsoil he found. It was under where the containers had been sitting before they were moved onto the piers.

He immediately began turning the soil.

Over the last couple of days I have begun erecting the fence to keep out the 'roos and wascally wabbits.

So far I have one round of fencing wire attached. Next I will add another layer above the first to make it around 1.6M high. I also need to run a layer of 600mm chicken wire around the base, with 200mm buried below the ground so rabbits don't dig their way in.
  

The fence wire and star pickets came from an old paddock fence I dismantled last year, and the gate is a cut down back door screen that Paul was going to throw out. It will probably get a lick of paint at some stage.

It is rather a large veggy garden and will allow me to support a small Andalucian village with fresh produce.

But if it exceeds my needs then in the future I can cordon off some of it for native seed raising beds.

I have also taken out a little bit more of the walling to open up three of the four containers to each other.

It's great to see the space beginning to emerge from the dark and narrow tunnels that were originally there.