Turning the first sod

I think I've been hanging around with politicians for too long. You see, I had in my head that they'd give us a call when they were ready to start digging up our site to level it out - maybe we'd head out there with a shiny, new, never-been-used shovel, to dig up the first chunk of dirt and turn it over, Kevin Rudd style, in front of the cameras.

But they obviously they don't do that with residential houses. Instead, I just drove past the other day and discovered someone has come around and levelled the whole thing out! Without even a courtesy call so we could rush out with a camera to capture the moment!

Quite seriously, we're just stoked to see something happening! Everything seems to take longer than we expect, so to see actual work being done on our block is very exciting!

We did actually create some of the delay with the site cut ourselves... you see, the standard site cut is they dig up enough dirt to level out the area for the slab - so just enough for the house to go on. On our block, there is a slight upward slope towards the back fence, so if they just levelled out enough for the house, then you would step out of the back door and onto a hill. We thought about this and figured that it would be far better to get them to level out the backyard now rather than get a landscaper to do it after the house has been built. So that meant we had to rejig some paperwork and pay a little bit extra.

Our next step is to put in a retaining wall, which will form part of the garden / landscaping at the end. Since my old man is a landscaper, we're getting him to do it. It's his birthday this weekend, so we've told him it's ok if he leaves it til next week. I did suggest we celebrate his birthday with a barbecue at Deer Park and build the retaining wall while we're there, but he didn't go for it.

Anyway, here is a photo of our block, all levelled off and with the OHS temporary fencing in place.