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.