Ideas in Action
“Oh Chloe, we mustn’t forget, the tree fellers are coming up tomorrow.”
“But I t’ought dere were only two fellers!”
Haaaaaaaaaaaaar har har.
“Ideas in Action” is one of Allan the Tree Feller’s many nicknames for us (also: “trouble”, “worker”, “Back” (for me, obviously) etc).
We met Allan through his mate and sometime co-worker Josh, who was attending our chainsaw course. Allan selectively fells and mills timber for a living.
They came up a couple of weeks ago to assess our site, and Allan’s offered us an excellent deal on felling the huge and rather dangerous trees in the clearing where our house will be going. The first trees came down less than a week after their first visit; milling of the timber began yesterday. The prospect of not having to buy in timber for the house build – at all – is making us extremely happy.
But above and beyond that, to our great good fortune, Allan is turning out to be an extraordinary brains trust and source of contacts. He claims to have taken us under his wing because we’re so unfailingly good-humoured (which is mostly true, I guess, although less charitable folks might call our “good humour” wall-to-wall silliness!); we think it’s also got something to do with the wince factor of two townies like us up on the Hill, learning as fast as we can but still fundamentally clueless on many fronts!
The acquisition of a solar system was continuing to give me a pain (I’ll let you guess where) – the numbers just wouldn’t crunch down far enough to make even a minimal off-grid system affordable – but then Allan secured us a supply of ex-Telstra exchange batteries. Problem solved. Oh, and he reckons he can get panels in a similar sort of vein. Problem really solved: just have to get my head around a regulator, an inverter / charger, cables, connectors and installation now.
Couldn’t find someone to insure the shed for love nor money. Went round and round for weeks. Allan gave me a name and number, and I rang yesterday; that’ll probably be sorted tomorrow.
Allan came up the other day, not to do anything that was useful for him, but rather just to help us move some of the more awkward bits and pieces around using his backhoe. Among many other bits and pieces, he grabbed the two explosives containers out of our middle shed, meaning that we’re now free to convert that into a second room.
(Here’s a large digression on the second room. We don’t currently really know how long the whole permitting process for the house is going to take, and the actual build thereafter will no doubt take quite some time as well. The winter of 2012 will not wait on us forever, so to cover our bases we’ve decided to make our current arrangement a lot more comfortable, in case we don’t yet have livable vaults up by the time the cold comes.
The things that are currently stored in the middle shed will be moved into the big shed.
We’ll then lay an insulated, tamped adobe floor, insulate and line the shed walls and put in a ceiling, replace the massive shed door with windows and a more person-sized door, and put in some kitchen units, basic plumbing and our first Rocket Mass Heater. Woohoo – finally an unbroken night’s sleep away from the dog!!! Not to mention: better positioning of beds in the container, storage space for clothes (four months of living out of a suitcase really is enough), storage space for food (one small cupboard for both food and cookware ain’t cutting it for us foodies), a place to sit down of an evening, and a wood heating solution that will keep us warm all day even if it only burns for a few hours of an evening!
The cool part is that, once we do start building the vaults, we’ll have even more flexibility: we can get WWOOFers in (and either continue sleeping in the container or move to a sleeping vault), or we can actually have guests other than those hardy souls who are prepared to brave the windy Hill in a tent. Once we’re completely out of the Sheds, they can remain fully self-contained WWOOFer and / or guest accommodation for ever after. Digression ends! Back to why Allan is a legend.)
Speaking of backhoes, we’ve been scratching our heads for months about what to do about Mavis the Deathtrap, the International 564 tractor which came with the place. She’s beautiful but merciless, with a stupidly high centre of gravity, a flat front tyre and no rollcage. Recipe for disaster, as C discovered by nearly tipping her the first time she ventured out! We were wincing at the idea of taking a huge hit to the “seed fund” by having to buy a brand new, tiny tractor which would do about half of what we need (with the rest to be done by a serious excavator) – but Allan sourced us a 64HP Massey-Ferguson backhoe instead (which has a big front end loader and a small bucket in the rear) for about a third as much, which will do more like 80% of what we need (more or less everything except big dams). He’s now talking about making us some forks for it, so that we can carry our delightful but awkwardly placed piles of salvage around the land without the anticipated hours of backbreaking labour.
While we were out inspecting the backhoe, Allan took us to meet his mate Wal. Wal seems quite shy at first, but ask him the right question, and he opens up like a kind of horticulturally and apiaristically expert flower. “See that tree?” he said to me, pointing out a semi-full-grown Blue Gum. “That single tree will give a hive of bees enough forage to produce about 250kg of honey in a year.” I boggled, and he went on, smiling gently: “That’s a fair few calories, eh? People underestimate the value of native trees in terms of their ability to produce food.”
We left Wal’s with a ute groaning with a bewildering range of cuttings, samples and actual plants. He wants his stocks to go forth and multiply, but beyond that, Wal’s just the sort of guy who’ll give you the shirt off his back if he likes you. We feel very privileged that he decided he liked us, and the same goes for Allan.