Earthworks

We tried our very best to level and compact the site ourselves this weekend – with very little success.

(check out the size of this tree stump!)

So this was a job for the experts. We commissioned Ralph Calautti Earth Moving and Site Works to do the compacting and levelling. They were in and out in a day, and left the site with a smooth and unbelievably robust surface which we could never have achieved on our own. Ralph is an awesome guy who knows his dirt really well, but hadn’t yet got into the email revolution!
Here are some photos after the compaction. We immediately started digging our main foundations for the toilet block, and setting out all our new pegs and levels.

We also finished the sign to put up the front facing Scarborough Beach Road.
The sign features one of the red (and two of the grey) Alpolic sample off-cuts that we plan to clad the toilet block with. Alpolic is a type of Aluminium Composite cladding which is as far from sustainable as you can get – however, a lot of suppliers sell offcuts of this cladding which are left-over from large-scale commercial projects. We created a rough impression of what the toilet block would look like with all the varying sizes of cladding we found and ended up with this jigsaw puzzle.
We are a bit doubtful about it though, because even though they are offcuts and not the real thing, it is still more expensive than using standard profiled sheeting.
Anyway, many more cost-cutting and value engineering processes are yet to commence! Until then.....!