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.