Over the next 12 months we built the kitchen but most important the loo. What joy and comfort to sit and contemplate about the world from the loo with a view and what a view.
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With views like this from the loo you tended to sit a lot and end up with a very
numb bum or fall over when you got up cause your legs had gone to sleep. The novelty of an open door loo soon wore off when winter came.
The kitchen
and bathroom were next and then a small
workshop for me and the whips. This was built from sandstone which the next door neighbour
had picked up in his fields and placed in piles. After building the log cabin I
had decided to never do that again. Moving 36ft logs weighing upwards of a ton
by hand wasn't fun anymore so we decided on stone for our next building material
and the best part was it was free, all we had to do was get it there.
Once again this was a whole new experience for me. Never
having
built with stone before it was a bit of a challenge but at the same time good
practice because we had decided to build the permanent house out of stone as well. More
on that later.
By now we also had a rough track put in from the front gate
to the house which was about 1 1/2 miles. Now we could drive right up to the
house and we thought everything was wonderful. Then along came winter.
In this part of Tasmania it rains a lot, 20 years ago it rained
even more. For the first few years that we were here the average rainfall was 60
inches for the year and that's fairly wet. In summer we would go and do our
shopping every week but when the winter arrived that all changed. The road
turned into a quagmire and we had to leave the Toyota Landcruiser, Tojo,
wherever it
stopped and carry all our supplies up on foot including gas bottles for the gas
refrigerator we had and the gas light. Needless to say we didn't go out much that
winter. After 20 years poor old Tojo is still with us in a semi retired state. The
only work he has to do now is carry a bit of fire wood and hay when we feed the
cows in winter. He isn't very road worthy anymore and he's had some surface
damage, even been shot accidentally a few times while hunting but we'll keep him
till one of us dies, I suspect he'll still be here when I'm gone.
By the next winter we had saved enough to have the road
gravelled and we
could use it all year round. For power a small generator did the job. I had
rigged up a 12 volt lighting system run off a battery which in turn was hooked
up to a charger which would charge the battery every time the generator was
turned on. The generator would be run for a few hours every night to watch a bit
of TV and at the same time would charge the battery. Later it also ran the
washing machine but until then we came across this one which we used for quite
awhile and it did the job wonderfully.
The
pic below is my mother being introduced to the wonders of modern technology when
she came for a visit.
We often have people come to visit and when they do the first
thing they say is, "where is your vege garden"? The vege
garden. When
we first arrived this was one of our first objectives, Everyone who lives in the
country has this dream of a vege garden full of fresh vegetables for the table,
self sufficiency, live off the land. That's OK if you don't live on a game
trail but it just so happens we do.
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