Excavation and piering completed

Excavation for house still going

It's also been affected by all the rain we have been getting, in this "rainiest summer in 50 years".

Rock excavation

After the long Christmas and New Years break, the excavator machine came in and started to dig quite a bit of sandstone out of the ground to match the pitch and slope of the site to the house design. As the main part of our old house was build right on top of sandstone foundation, the rock excavation is expected to take a good few days even with the huge driller, digger, and huge circular saw.

Rock excavation cost is separate to our build tender, but it was within our expectation so there was not too much of a big surprise.

The huge circular saw to cut through the rocks (round thing at top of photo).

Pool Excavation

A digger for our pool came in to dig the huge hole in the ground.
We have hired a separate pool company to do our pool, and they are project managed by our landscape people. Doing the pool at the same time as our new house is stretching our budget a bit, but we rationalised that if we don't do the pool now and leave it after the house is built, there will be quite a bit of extra cost associated with the difficult access to the pool site in the future. If we really can't stretch our budget to have our dream luxury pool finished by the time our house is done, we will just leave the hole in the ground as it is and work on it later as our finances allow.

Anyway, we have a huge hole in our back yard!

Demolition fences are gone

All remnants of our old house is gone. The main part of our house was built on top of huge sandstone slab, so we assume that they will have to dig out all the rocks out of the ground next.

Empty Plot

Demolition continues

Our neighbour sent me an SMS to let me know that a big excavator came in today to bulldoze our house down. They have done the front room (which used to be our bedroom) and will work again tomorrow to get the house down to brick foundation.

Our old house is finally disappearing! It feels more exciting than sad to see that it is going. The old house was falling apart around us as we lived in it for the last 5 1/2 years, and it was about time it's bulldozed!

However I did feel just a little sentimental when I saw the lavender blue colour of our older son's bedroom wall paint. This was the room that we brought him home from the hospital. Memories of all the late night feedings and sleepless nights came flashing by but they went away quickly too. We are in a new chapter of our lives.