SwimGym, and then the fun really began.

The Cottage Refurbishment

Carl and his helper came about 8:30 am; Paul and Matt were already here. Paul and Matt continued over at the new site plus removing some of the exterior drainpipes and similar that might otherwise fall off during the move.

Carl and helper then jacked up the cottage on nine steel hydraulic jacks. Then they brought one of two large removal trucks and manoeuvred it into position. The articulated Kenwood truck with a large and loud engine had an amazing array of hydraulic pipes giving control over the steering of each of the three back axles independently plus the deck could be raised and lowered by several feet and it could tip from side to side, enabling it to inch a building across a bridge that wasn’t wide enough or round a tight corner. The most impressive thing though, and Harry would really like this I think, was that its articulation link – where it rested on the short tray of the front piece of the truck – which could slide back and forth almost two metres. So the whole rig could move a bit like a snake – the truck engine and cab could push itself forward a couple of meters while the back with the house on it stayed still. Then the truck would stay still as hydraulics pulled the back towards it. This allowed very precise and careful positioning of the house on the truck bed.

As it turned out the ground was too wet for normal loadup-and-drive-away, the whole caboodle just churned up mud and skidded so Carl ended up inching his way a couple of metres at a time from the old site to the new.

After an hour of too-ing and fro-ing Carl has the cottage within a couple of inches of where the cottage was supposed to be and, under the conditions, that’s good enough. Only the most unkind person will remind us in years to come that well, the cottage isn’t quite lined up with the homestead is it. In practice our buildings aren’t so very regular that a couple of inches will be obvious without measuring, and once you take gutters and other irregularities into consideration, even if the cottage had been magically placed precisely on the string line, (now is that the outside of the weatherboard, or the inside, etc., etc.), we would be no more perfectly aligned with the homestead than we are now.

So tomorrow there’s a 2-metre section of one bearer that is too rotten to save and it will be replaced, and then Carl and helper will dig the pile holes whiole Paul and Matt dig the pile holes for the new extension. Then, tomorrow afternoon, Elizabeth the archaeologist will come to peer down these holes and assure herself we’re not hiding any priceless artifacts. And after that the piles can go in and the cottage can be lowered onto them.

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