The great water tank migration

Brrrm, brrrrm, brrrrm

We have a water tank now.  You have no idea how hard it is to get one of these things from the industrial area where it is made to a place in the middle of nowhere where we live.

They don't deliver to the middle of nowhere.  Well they do, but you have to pay for a truck and two workers, each way.  So TJ hired a trailer and I borrowed some old tyres to protect the tank from the edge of the trailer and he drove it at about 20km/hr on a major freeway on a windy day, listening to the gentle sound of every other vehicle beeping him.  On its side and empty, this thing was a huge sail trying to make the trailer go in a different direction from the car.  I'm really glad I wasn't there.

Last weekend, we found some old treated pine logs and used them as rollers under the tank to move it across the landscape.  It was nice to find a use for the Logs That Will Not Die - you can't build with them, cut them or burn them because they are contaminated with arsenic for all eternity, but you can roll a tank over them.  We inched that baby over the ground, laying ply from the formwork over rocks, to get to the new tank stand.

I never did blog the tank stand.

Check out the form work! That was some serious maths.

The tank stand took us about two whole days to make out of concrete, back in winter or early spring. Just as we screeded off the top (I have all the concrete lingo now) it started pelting with rain.  We covered it as soon as we could, but as us concrete experts know (trust me, over the years I've made one thing out of concrete), you can't go back and smooth it out again or the cement will rise out of the mix and it will crack.  Thus, something as ephemeral as a raindrop is immortalised for eternity.

"Greeeeg the stop sign ..."

Luckily, we have now removed the formwork and covered that mess in a water tank that fits to within a few millimetres. Here's the finished product.  Very rural.

Just add water