Our first surprise came when the builders discovered that the big poles they felled were not sitting in the 400mm square holes per the engineer’s drawings from the original house build in 1999. They were actually anchored in a cubic metre of concrete. The worst katabatic winds of the universe wouldn’t have blown them over. This cubic metre of concrete was right where we needed to pour the new slab. And we couldn’t just pour it over the top. Oh no. Too easy to do that. We had to get the Really Big digging machines, and then call in their big brothers too. About a week later, the two 7 tonne pieces of concrete sat on the lawn (and I use the term loosely) waiting for a crane to lift them onto some super reinforced truck much like those you see at open cut mines.

Rest assured, these are bigger than they look.

They left two rather big holes…………

Where the concrete blocks used to be.

This is when we got very familiar with the Builder’s Variation fees. Several thousand dollars later, the Big Rocks are gone, the Big Holes are full of compacted dirt (took two days to do that) and now it’s time to prepare for the new slab. And all the while, they pulled off the bathroom wall.