Monday 8th June 2009

Talk about few and far between; this blog is turning into a quarterly update!. Things have been slowed significantly due to a few factors. Bernt’s 3 weeks in Holland have meant that we had to wait for 3 decent looking payslips after he got home to take to the bank to beg for more money. So that meant waiting a month after he was home and since then we have been playing one sided paperwork tennis with the banks. It’s been 2 and a half months and we’ve just managed to sign the final documents for our loan. Still have a couple of weeks to wait till things are finalised… mmmm, don’t get me started…

Bank issues aside we have been having other progress on the block. As well as our exciting side adventure which I will cover in detail in a few paragraphs J. After over a year of dealing with the local electricity supply company we finally got a power pole put in on our boundary! Yay! That was a pretty exciting day, full of trucks and fluoro vests! I watched on with worry as they decided it was easier to drag the power pole up the driveway than trying to haul it on its trailer. Surprisingly to me (not to them, they were very confidant about the whole thing) it didn’t damage the driveway even slightly.

Then, not long after the excruciating 3 weeks of Bernt being away (with a traumatised dog who kept running outside to check if ‘daddy’ was coming home or insisting on checking out the bed to see if ‘daddy’ was just having a really long sleep in) we decided to add to the family and brought home George the cat. He and Charlie were playing and sleeping together almost immediately, though George wasn’t real keen about the ‘head in Charlie’s mouth’ game… which not surprisingly turned out to be one of Charlie’s favourite new games.

Charlie asleep in a very flattering position while George sleeps on his bed. 

Bernt and I plodded along on the block, tidying up and taking off the boxing (the framework for the slab pour). Waterproofing the sides of the slab and infilling nearly up to slab height with drainage rock, things that made it look much neater for the valuer. Also laying pipe to eventually connect the drain pipes to the watertank (we learnt our lesson and had a guy come with a little excavator to dig for us).

Over Easter we decided to build a concrete ramp so we could drive up into the workshop space. We built the boxing with a cool curve in it to follow the line of the driveway. Building it took a solid 5 hours of mixing and pouring concrete in our little mixer. It was utterly exhausting but we were very happy with the finished product. Because we had chosen to sleep in a little that day Bernt ended up at the block in the dark until nearly midnight waiting for it reach that right balance between set enough but not set too much in order to smooth it to a nice finish. Luckily it dried slow enough that we could put the final touches on it the next morning. Also lucky that ramps should have a fairly rough finish… because that’s as far as our concreting skills allowed us to get… Thank god we didn’t try and finish off the slab ourselves. None the less, it is a very pretty ramp and I still insist on rave reviews from every person who has the pleasure of driving on it J

Before ramp

Finished Ramp

We also got around to finding an electrician to hook us up to electricity by installing a metre box with power point. The most super satisfying feeling to boil the kettle and have our first cup of tea on the block!! Can’t believe we’ve been here for a year with no power, or rather with only a noisy and annoying generator to get the job done. Hallelujah for electricity!!

Boiling the kettle for our first cuppa (on top of our new meter box)

I received my Kevin money, fairly early judging from facebook feedback. Thanks Kev! And with that little windfall I bought my dream basin! Well ordered it anyway, it’ll take over a month to get here. Its an Aussie company so that means I’m doing my bit doesn’t it?

So, now… let’s get back to the exciting side adventure that Bernt and I are embarking on!! About 3 weeks ago we went along to the Sustainable Building expo in Hobart, thinking we would come across some cool innovative technology… What we ended up coming across was a beautiful ger (pronounced like ‘there’). A ger is a tent which Mongolian nomadic herdsmen (apparently 30% of the Mongolian population) live in, it is otherwise known as a yurt but apparently ger is the more PC term. It was standing, fairly conspicuously, amongst solar hot water and sustainable septic system stands. We decided to go in and have a look…. and…. absolutely fell in love. It is a 6.5 metre diameter circular tent with beautifully hand painted roof poles and a sort of latticework wall structure. In the centre of the roof is a wooden circle held up by 2 posts covered by a flap which is either open or closed depending on the weather. The walls and roof are made of layers of cotton (inside and out for aesthetics), thick thick felt (which keeps the Mongolians warm at minus 40 Celsius) and canvas (which makes it water proof). It had the cosiest, womb kind of feeling inside and I didn’t want to leave. That was when we saw the ‘For Sale, 60% off’ sign…. Oh no…. Bernt and I looked at each other and all kinds of craziness ensued. 

Saatia, who’s business it represented, told us that she was in Hobart till Monday at which point she would be driving the (our) ger back to Melbourne. It was understood that we would need some instruction on how to assemble it so if we wanted it the most logical and economical thing would be for us to decide tute sweet and for her to bring it to our block and set it up for us before she drove off into the sunset on Monday. An evening of negotiations followed between Bernt and I… An intense evening full of lists, shortness of breath and near heart attacks (the latter obviously being only experienced by me… not cool hand BerntJ) We decided no, a fairly definite no at one point in the evening but then I started breathing again, picked myself up out of the foetal position and we decided, what the hell, you only live once, lets do it!!! Oh My God!!! 

So we dove in, and by Monday afternoon we had our very own little piece of Mongolia sitting in its temporary position on our slab. We are now in the process of organising all of the minute (haha) details of how we can actually functionally live in the thing! CRAZY! We wont be moving out of our rental until it has a decent bathroom (I’ve ordered a very respectable self contained composting toilet) and we have worked through all of the other logistical issues. But I’m very very excited and have been playing around with super essential things like fairly lights J I hope you all want to come and visit when it is set up! Ill post photos of the interior when its liveable to alleviate any concerns! OH MY GOD! What a crazy adventure!