The last two months have been a roller coaster ride. Building has started, but it has been stop and go... The first few weeks were a flurry of activity - with the first excavations done and the slab poured in under two weeks. Suddenly it was imperative that we choose all our bathroom items - the plumbing would all be laid in under the slab. We did it all on one Saturday morning at the local Reece outlet. My head was fairly reeling after we let and I suffered a few pangs of anxiety - did we choose the right taps...?

One of the concrete team was an old Italian guy who took P aside one day to show him our small patch of heritage vegetables braving the earthworks in their own little gully. There was an Italian broccoli and several spinach plants that we hadn't even noticed! We've since transplanted them to pots near S's house. It's great to think we can carry the seeds of previous gardeners through to our new garden one day. We also pulled the olive tree from under a wreck of branches and have placed it in a large pot - not sure if it will survive the shock however...

Then the deluge started... and stayed... In the last two weeks we've had 1.5 working days of fine weather - so the digger man came and started on the next stage of excavations which will give us the different levels of the garden and allow foundations for retaining walls. As we are on a slope, there are quite a few of these walls needed. The large mud pie that now surrounds the slab is starting to make sense and give us an idea of the final lay of the land. Dad has been great in the department of moral support and under-foreman. He came around to back me up in talking to the digger man and sorting out the good soil from the bad. Because of the debris from the driveway works we have a heap of clay sitting on top of good topsoil. I did a fair bit of digging by hand last Thursday in the sweltering midday heat to try and move an inaccessible pile of clay into the path of the bobcat. I might try and save some of the clay to make into a bowl for the new house. It is sometimes white streaked with red, sometimes more of an ochre in colour.

We've realised how important it is to be around while the building is happening - we have averted a few disasters already in this way. The first major one was that the concrete guys marked out the front door in the wrong spot - it turns out they were going by an old version of the house plans!

So P is taking this Friday off to take delivery of our kit from Victoria (that is if the truck can get close enough to the slab - with the mudbath down the back this is not a certain thing). This will be the posts and beams that are the structural skeleton of the house. Our house will be built in a topsy turvy way - the roof will go up before the walls. This can only happen because the walls are not load bearing - the wooden posts (250 mm wide) will do this job.