We've been very busy so blog posts haven't been happening. But the last couple of weekends have been caught up with erecting the tunnel house (well at the last place it was 2 tunnel houses, here it's one thumping great big long one!)

Erecting these things requires a lot of mucking around and a lot of pulling and tugging and kneeling and well - whinging, so we were really lucky that Jude and Jan made the trek down 2 weekends in a row to help out. Especially as Jude's car carked it in Donald on the way back on the first Sunday night and she had to be towed back to Warracknabeal! We tried to compensate a little with a trip to the Talbot Farmers Market on the following Sunday before we got stuck into the final run on the hot houses. (Okay well going to that market is no hardship for us - we just love it, but Jude and Jan hadn't been before so I think they had a good morning as well).

But back to hot houses. We've got lots of photos of progress so I might break this up a little into multiple posts.

So we started out laying out the hoops roughly where we wanted them, then we roughly worked out where to dig the holes for the footings.

To dig, or not to dig (probably more likely where to dig...)

Once the footings were dug in (did we mention that doing that by hand got bloody old really quickly and we went for the petrol powered hole digger!), the next step was to put the boards along the bottom that the plastic is attached to. Adam got these fabulous hardwood boards from the recycled timber yard up in Dunolly (which is a truly magnificent place). But boy were they hard. Unbelievably bloody hard. Turned out the brace and bit was about the only option for drilling the holes in the blasted things. So everyone had a go, we managed to put up a lot of smoke signals and bent the bit really badly...

The hoops went into place very easily - getting the bracing bar at the top required a bit more than just one ladder, so the motorised toolbag (aka the ute) served double time as a ladder.

Moving the "ladder" into place.

Every work site requires a couple of supervisors. Forgot to distribute shovels so we all had something to lean against.

He's probably waiting for us to find whatever tool or gizmo got dropped somewhere at the other end from where it's actually needed!

After all this mucking around it was starting to get dark so here ended the first Sunday and we're back into the slog next weekend.

And here we are on the following Sunday - all hoops in place, all sharp edges neatly wrapped up in tape, doors installed, plastic on the ground and a "conference" underway on the best way to proceed.

Luckily we did the plastic spreading on Sunday - on Saturday it was blowing a gale and I thought we'd all end up in Bendigo, desperately hanging onto a large piece of plastic!

More soon.