With the wet weather, we were traipsing a lot of mud into the shouse. We'd decided early on that we were going to have a stone stoop (well, we would love a stone stoop if we could afford such extravagances but had settled on tiles for the verandah and a stone step).
While at Tony Williams to collect hydrated lime for the render, we had spied a pile of gorgeous pink granite (which is not pink but rather reddy-brown). Each time we went there to top up on lime, we would scurry through the pile of pink granite to see if there was a suitable piece for the doorstep. On one such day, we found not one but two pieces that we liked. As the weather was wet and the quest had already taken over 6 months I declared that a two piece doorstep, while not ideal, would be fine.
The only problem was that each piece was about 350mm thick. Firstly, that meant further excavation and I am still to recover from digging the footings. Secondly, being granite, it meant that, once again, we'd be battling weighty beasts for a day in order to lay the doorstep.
While the guys at Tony Williams used the forklift to get the pieces into the trailer, we had to devise a method to get the rocks from the trailer, around the far side of the building and into their final resting place.
The gentleman builder and I had gained some muscle mass since the start of the build and together we managed to flip the stones end on end and land them onto a loose straw bale to get them out of the trailer. We then moved them, one at a time on rollers to the front door.
Then the digging began. Again. We wanted the doorstep hard up against the shouse wall and under the red gum board so it was mainly crowbar work to get the hole dug. Thankfully, there was not a lot of space for two people to work so I generously let the gentleman builder do the majority of the digging. We measured the hole to the nth degree to ensure that the rocks would fit as closely as possible on the first attempt.
![]() |
Little Miss in the hole for the doorstep |
We used the rollers again to get the first stone as close to the hole as possible and set up quite a precarious arrangement of strawbales, a left-over timber beam and the endless winch to be able to lower the stones into place.
Unfortunately, as we lowered the second stone into place the bolt that was holding the chain for the endless winch broke and flew off at great speed, clipping my thumb in the process. Pain resulted, followed by swelling, throbbing and intense heat. Out came the freezie block from the lunchbox Esky and, when, after ten minutes of ice the pain had not subsided (I had even agreed to taking Panadol); the gentleman builder insisted on a quick trip to the Foster hospital emergency department. Being a Sunday the radiologist was not on duty but, thankfully, the rostered GP had taken a few crash courses and was confident to take some films of my hand. Thankfully the bone was not broken but was chipped and would need 4-6 weeks of rest to heal.
We returned to the block about 2 hours later with my hand securely strapped and a supply of panadeine forte (which I had insisted I did not need but I actually succumbed to taking one to get to sleep that night).
Luckily, the gentleman builder is a talented and patient man as he managed to manoeuvre the final stone into place and backfill the hole without any assistance. Admittedly, it took about 5 times as long as the first stone did but he got there in the end.
In the end we were very happy with the doorstep and the gentleman builder is convinced that in a thousand years all that will be left of the building will be two pieces of pink granite submerged in the bedrock.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Thanks for making a comment, your opinion is valued