Moving Day

We've mostly got the roof on now so today we knocked together some stairs that Spy can climb and made the move. OK, so most of the front wall is missing, there is no door, verandah, or power. There is still three windows to cut out and most of the floor boards are just sitting in place to dry but this is much better than spending another night in the mouldy tent.

Spy vs. crab

Coconut crab

And he's still digging. I saw the crab run away ages ago.

 

Hip rafters

We've made some forward progress and some backward. We put about a third of the floor down but then pulled it back up again when we found how much damage the sun was doing to it. Turns out there's a good reason you should put the roof on before the floorboards. We also put one wall and a window on, but most importantly we got the hip rafters up and one of the coconut crossbeams. The other crossbeam is too heavy to lift right now because it was only cut about four weeks ago and is still very green so we'll put that in later on.

 

Next we will do the other, jack rafters, that go between these hip rafters, then cut things to length. The roof overhang will only be 300mm due to hurricanes.

We've also towed the roof battens out to the island now so just the roofing iron to go. That'll require a trip on the raft.

I lost my phone in town when I lay down to poke my hernia back in but luckily a kind soul dropped it in to the police station. I paid a $50 reward for it which I hope actually went to the finder and not the cop beer fund, but then a couple of days later took it for a swim so now I have no phone :-(

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Floor has landed

We towed the floorboards out to the island today.

 

Spy decided we'd made him a jetty to spy on the fish from. At that moment there were two big tuna swimming along the beach.

Should get the floor down in the next few days. There is still a little bit of framing work to finish off first.

Rugby and joists

On Friday Tongans were out in force to support their team, wearing their colours and driving around honking horns.

I'm almost glad the team lost because town would have been shut down for days of celebration.

We got the floor joists on today and are just starting to tie and bolt things down.


 

We need to haul floor boards over to the island but the winds have been too strong for the last week and it looks like they will continue for another week until we get a break so it might be another quiet week on the island.

Hut posts done

It's been a fairly slow couple of weeks but today we finally got the last of the hut posts concreted in, the bearers on and the outer two floor joists in place. Work has been slowed by the need to get aggregate, cement, etc. over to the island but also because I've gone and given myself a hernia, leaving Mandy to do more than her fair share of the work. We're yet to come up with a plan to manage that but the hospital in Nuku'alofa is pretty good so I guess I'm going to have to take a few weeks off to get surgery. That will put us well into the rainy season and the tent is already showing signs of rot and mould.

We also cut down a couple of Fijian kauri trees that the neighbour said we could thin from his plot to make some posts for the verandah. We got three 3m posts out of each tree. We had to float them round from the other side of the island. A fun fact is that the bottom half of a freshly cut kauri tree doesn't float, so that was a bit of a surprise.  However with the top half tied in as well they were roughly neutrally bouyant so only needed a little encouragement to walk them round the island. We still need to get more aggregate and cement over for those but they can wait a while to dry.

Visa

We finally got our Visas today. We applied for our Visas in March so this is about normal we're told.

First post

Lovely day in paradise today. This is the eastern beach.

 

So no, of course I don't mean my first post to the blog, but we did concrete the first house corner post in today. We weren't able to lift the post into the hole so used a kind of gin pole arrangement.

We formed a cross using two 150x50 (6x2") timbers tied with rope in the center and bottom and were able to fairly easily lift the post using the long tail of the cross for leverage and prop it up.

Then using a hand-crank boat trailer winch we pulled the cross forward, lifting the post upwards.

And with a little assistance from the crowbar dropped it into the hole.

We bought some aggregate on the mainland at TOP$10 per sack. It's crushed coral rock, which is of course limestone, except quite a bit harder than what we're used to in NZ. It took a couple of dinghy trips to bring 3 sacks and a bag of cement over to the island. We bulked it up 50/50 with sand we collected from about 20 meters in from the high tide line so it wasn't salty, and chucked in a quite a few coral rocks to bulk it up a bit more. It took a good chunk of the day to collect rocks, sand, water from the well and get the post raised, braced and concreted but getting the first corner pole in made for a good day.

Don't forget the camera

I remembered this time. This is the coral about 400 m southeast of the house.

Broken ground

Today we dropped the last of the large trees that would pose a risk to the hut (except for a couple of smallish coconut trees)

 

We also pegged out the hut corners and broke ground on the first of the pole foundations

 

We hit old coral rock at 950mm, which is fine because I only wanted the holes to be 900mm. However, this hole was the farthest from the waterfront so we might not make the full 900 on the closer ones. The holes are 400mm wide and the poles are 200mm wide. It was fairly easy digging in gluggy red clay.