We had a rather eventful weekend, some joyous news and an unfortunate accident. I’ll be writing the exciting news soon, the photo on the left is a bit of a teaser…

The accident involved my son head butting the concrete retaining wall in our backyard. This is the second time he’s done it, but this time was far worse than the last and involved a trip in an ambulance to the Alberta Children’s Hospital.

The first time he did it he was playing tug-of-war with his sister and hit the back of his head, this time he fell off the play equipment and hit the front of his head on the concrete retaining wall.

We had thought of moving the play equipment, but given that the first accident had nothing to do with the swing set moving the structure would only be a partial fix. To be honest I’m still not sure how he fell all the way off the equipment to the concrete retaining wall since when we put in the equipment we put it what we thought would be a safe distance away.

Removing the concrete retaining wall isn’t an option as our yard is over 1 metre higher than our neighbours backyard.

So I’m requesting some advice from anyone reading this post. How would you recommend we child proof our concrete retaining wall?

The Shade Cloth cover we picked up for at Bunnings for only $40! It is a 4 metre x 4 metre Coolaroo Shade Cloth Sail that comes with a 15-year warranty and offers 90% UV protection. It was discounted because it’s a non-standard colour, even though it matches our paint colour scheme almost perfectly.

First I sunk 150mm diameter posts 60cm into the ground and then filled it with cement for the outer posts. At the base of the posts I made sure that the concrete sloped down, so the water would run away and not pool against the posts. I then put I-bolts through the posts for my anchor points.

Against the side of the house I found where the timber studs were and simply screwed the stainless steel eye plates through the siding and into the studs.

The shade cloth sail has stainless steal rings at the four corners, so once my anchor points were down I used turnbuckles to attache the shade cloth sail to the anchor points.

After attaching the shade cloth sail to the four anchor points I used the turnbuckles to tension everything so that it ended up with a nice even tension over the surface of the shade cloth sail.

All up the cover only cost about $240 including the posts, concrete, shade cloth and all the brackets.

Note: One of my posts ended up farther away than I had planned, so I used some chain link to extend the turnbuckle to the anchor point on the post.

We finally finished off our back patio a few weekends ago. Since we sold the deck that we were originally going to put on the back of the house we ahead with covered patio, coming out of the back door.

The Shade Cloth Cover of the patio works great for keeping the sun off the table and chairs for most of the day.

We ended up putting down a stone patio, rather than laying laying down patio pavers. This was a much more economical solution, and a lot easier to do as well as we got the whole patio laid in a single day.

Now that I have a nice area to sit down and cook in I am definitely out there using the barbeque more. It’s a nice place to kick back with a drink and book too when I get the chance.

After cutting out the driveway and laying down the roadbase the guys came back to pour the concrete.

Before they could pour the concrete they put down a black plastic membrane. From what I understand the plastic membrane is meant to provide a moisture barrier between the ground and the concrete. They did the same thing before they poured the slab for under our house.

To help attach the new driveway to the existing slab under the house and at the bottom of the stairs they drilled holes into them and rammed steel rebar into them. The embedded steel rebar helped to create anchor points for the new driveway.

To lay the steel over the plastic membrane they put down dozens of small plastic cones. The plastic cones elevated the steel mesh about 75mm above the plastic. The steel mesh clicked into the plastic cones.

Once the steel was in place they poured the concrete into the formwork they had put around the outside of the new driveway. They used  wheelbarrows to cart the concrete down the side of the house. Trowels were used to then flatten out the concrete, give it the right shape and depth, and make sure that the fall on the garage is away from the house.

After a few hours of drying time the crew came back to spray off the top layer of concrete . This revealed the pebbles on top to give the driveway  the pebblecreate / aggregated look.

A few days after they were finished I spent the morning painting and sealing the new driveway. The clear sealant that I used on the driveway should make it easier to wash off any drips from the car, and it gives the driveway a permanent "wet" look, which is very effective.

Before they could start putting in our new driveway they had to prepare the site.

The first step for this was to cut away the old driveway and remove it. Because of the height difference between the old driveway and the garage they only cut away the first half of the drive.

As you can see in the photo on the left they made followed a very systematic approach to cutting up the old concrete. They made pretty quick work of it too using the concrete saw.

It became clear why they were so precise with the cutting up of the driveway when the bobcat arrived the next day. It probably only took the bobcat about 15-minutes to remove the concrete driveway pieced and drop them into the skip that was delivered.

They then used the bobcat to flatten the area down a bit before dumping a few cubic metres of gravel roadbase / crackadust down and levelling it off. This will provide the base that the concrete will be poured onto when that gets delivered tomorrow.

We are getting a new aggregate driveway put in when we replace our existing driveway. As we looked at what to do with our driveway, how much of it to replace and what sort of driveway we were going to get put in cost obviously played a part in making our decision.

To get our new aggregated driveway installed over our existing driveway, including removing portions of our existing driveway and preparing the site, will cost about $85.00 per square metre.

My wife was always been a big fan of the aggregated driveway, and the cost difference between it and a regular driveway is negligible. Here in Townsville it seems to be the most popular type of driveway to put in with new homes being built in the older areas, or in the new areas.

I have heard aggregated driveways also called "pebblecrete", because it looks like pebbles on top of concrete.

Up until now our garage has been virtually inaccessible because of the original old driveway. The original driveway is about 20cm (8 inches) below the garage entrance, which is rather difficult to navigate.

I had already tried to build a ramp out of timber, but that didn’t work very well as it had a very steep angle and moved around a lot. That left us with three options to get into our garage from our driveway:

• Build a permanent concrete ramp from the existing driveway into the garage.
• Replace the entire driveway with a new driveway.
• Replace a portion of the driveway.

After looking at those three options we have decided to replace a portion of the driveway.

The portion that we have decided to replace is a large portion of the original driveway. We will be replacing all of the driveway inside of our property line. We probably would have looked at replacing the entire driveway with a new one, but that would have slowed us down a lot.

If we were to replace the driveway from the curb to the front of our property line it would have cost an extra $3000 or so. We would have also had to submitted plans to council, which would have most likely taken months to be approved.

In our area of West End in Townsville there has been significant road works this year. Most of the road works have been focused on improving the drainage in the area, and has included replacing the gutters. Our builder reckons that our road will have the gutters replaced in the next few years.

When the council replaces the gutters on the street they usually also replace the first metre or so of any driveways affected. When that happens we can always revisit the idea of replacing that final section that will be left of the original driveway.

To clean up all the rubbish that the builders have created while working under the house they ordered a 6 tonne rubbish skip to take all the construction waste away. They filled up about half the skip, leaving the other half free for me to fill with all of our left over construction waste from previous work.

Our backyard garden has been so full of rubbish due to the construction that we haven’t felt safe sending the kids out there alone. The builder who put up the front stairs left all of his rubbish behind after a rather unsatisfactory experience with him. The half empty skip will finally let me dispose of all that leftover waste.

The largest piece that you can see in the photo is the landing from the original set of front stairs. My original plan was to use the old landing as a cubby house / stage for the kids in the backyard. It could have been a lot of fun for them, but with everything else going on I was probably never going to get around to building it for them. Like the deck, it was better to get rid of it than leaving it hanging around causing stress, taking up room and reminding me of one more project that I never managed to finish.

Now with the back garden bed finally cleared out I can move the swing set out of the middle of the yard and back into the garden bed, where it used to reside. That will clear up the middle of the yard for more backyard cricket and football, which Caleb will certainly enjoy.

The pavers that you see on the right of the photo above are destined to be our patio out the back door of the ground floor on the house. That is pretty much the only thing left in our rear garden bed.

Technorati Tags: backyard, garden bed

A tree in front of our friends place was blown over with the strong 90km per hour winds we have had in Townsville this week.

The tree was rotted out at the bottom and infested with termites from what Josiah said.

I’ve had to cut down a few different palm trees since we moved into our house because of rot or ant / termite infestation. It seems that if the palm trees get damaged or too water logged they are ripe for infestation. Thankfully I cut down our palm trees before we had the strong winds.

The house in the photo has undergone a lot of renovations in the last few years. I can garantee that they would not be very happy with the tree coming down on their fixed up roof and gutters.

Tags: palm tree, termites

This year the Townsville City Council has started to allow free disposal of Garden Waste at their land fill sites.

I reckon that part of the reason for the free domestic garden waste disposal is to stop garden waste going into the regular land fill in Townsville. Because Townsville is growing at such a rapid pace there is increased pressure put on the existing land fill site and the general waste disposal system here in Townsville.

We are currently using a garden bag service that we pay a monthly fee to. The new free domestic garden waste disposal is putting a lot of pressure on the companies that do the garden bag services, because they are still charged to dispose of the garden waste, even though most of the waste comes from domestic sources.

We might be looking at cancelling our garden bag service, but given the time saved, the cost of petrol, and the headache of borrowing a trailer, I am awfully tempted to keep paying for the service…

Source: Townsville City Council – Citiwaste

Technorati Tags: townsville, garden waste disposal