Now We Have A Lid

It has been all action here since our last update. The last two weeks have been a frenzy of activity. The carpenters have been in every day finalising the roof trusses, fitting the upper floor windows, and building our top deck.

More importantly, this week has been very exciting for Isabella as she started "big school". You can see her in the photo above just before we left for her first day. That is Uncle Adam in the background on the roof.

Speaking of which, Adam has been up over the last week & a half putting the roof on. He has done a great job and we are really happy with both the finished product and the colour we chose (jasper for all those interested).

Adam is putting the finishing touches on today, and we won't see him again for a couple of weeks until after the brickies and renderer finish.

The brickies are due to return on Tuesday....let's see if they actually do.

Finally, the image below was taken standing at our front door. It's a bit dark but if you look through the scaffold on the other side, you will be able to make out our view. Here you are looking through a hall, then through the lounge room, and then through the deck. We have a raked ceiling going from the lounge room over the deck and there will be 2 triangle windows sitting above the back stacked doors.

4m Above Street Level

At more than a month since my last update, we have had 2 weeks of intense action and the rest where absolutely nothing happened. The photo above is a little dark (& crooked), but it does show that we now have both a top level, and also roof trusses, so you can sort of make out how the finished house will look.

These shots were taken last weekend and since then, the trusses are finished, and the house is covered in scaffold. The steel arrived for the back deck and roof yesterday, and Adam (my brother) is putting the colourbond roof on next week. So we will have colour.

The photo below shows the back of the house. The rooms are (as you look at them):

Bottom left - Isabella's room
Bottom middle - rumpus room
Bottom right - Our bedroom until the kids settle in, and then Ben's
Top left - Main bedroom, eventually will be ours, but is Nanny's if you ask the kids
Top middle - Living room
Top Right - Dining room, with kitchen behind it.

The is a big deck (don't say that if you are Kiwi) coming off the top & bottom and the middle roofline will also come out over the top of it (hence the steel today)

It also shows how much landscaping we also have to do!!!

Looks Like A Different Block Now

At almost a month since our last post, both a lot and not much have happened at the same time.

The brickwork has been completed around the bottom floor, the front wall has been water-proofed, the water tanks have arrived, the floor joists and floor have been installed, and just yesterday, a whole bunch of fill was delivered to level up the front of the block.

The top storey frames and the roof trusses should have already been on by now, but between a heap of rain, and getting stuffed around on fill, they are not.

The frames will hopefully be up by Christmas, and the garage slab should be being poured today (we will see about that when I get home).

It should be quite an exciting start to the year for us as the builder has promised that his people will be getting stuck in to make up for lost time...very frustrating!!!

If I don't post in the next week, we hope that you all have a great Christmas and a safe new year.

Bellsy The Brickie

In these tough economic times, we need to save as much money where we can. This is our new brickie...and she works cheap!!!

Our last update showed the bricks arriving, and starting to be laid. They have now laid about 85% of the bottom floor of our house, and the bottom right hand corner of the photo below is where they will now start to form up to lay a floating concrete slab for the garage.

Over the next couple of days the block wall at the front will be filled with concrete, in readiness for the whole front yard to be filled with soil, to bring the level up to the garage and front door.

The brickies will then be back to finish the last little peice of the bottom floor, the floor frame will go on, then we can do it all again for the upper floor!

Below where the front door will be (about where the red conveyor belt is in the photo below), they have had to put some extra brickwork in to hold up the garage floor. This has created a little room with a small door on it (up to my shoulders). Even before I could claim it for a cellar or something similar, the kids had claimed it as a disco room. So now, when no one is working on the house, they go in and dance & sing....should I tell them that it will become the "naughty room"???

I have also reloaded the frame photo in the 15 October post below, it should now expand when you click it so that you can actually see the labels I put on the rooms.

Ben the Foreman

This is Ben in his foreman's chair, he drags it over and plonks himself in it every chance he can get to supervise the builders.

The bricks arrived the other day. 4,000 bricks were sitting in pallets up and down the street, the next day the crane arrived and lifted them down the hill. I think Isabella and Ben screamed from excitement, when they saw the big crane. The novelty wore off pretty quickly for Bellsy, but Ben sat in his supervisor's chair for about 90 minutes and didn't really move...boys and toys!!!

We were lying in bed at about 6.30a yesterday and there was all noise and action coming from the block. The brickies arrived. These guys don't mess around, they were straight into it and worked most of the day.

They had to stop when they reached door & window height, as we are still waiting for replacement sliding doors for the back bedrooms. An error which I think has cost us about 3 weeks.

At least we have action again and hopefully in the next few days the brickwork will be up to the first floor and we will have half a house (and half a mortgage!)

Bottom Floor Frame

After two weeks of absolutely nothing (and I mean nothing) happening, yesterday the bottom floor frame went up. I left for work at 7am, and there was no frame even delivered, and by the time I got home in the evening, the frame was standing and fully completed.

It isn't without drama though. There is a great big post down the middle of the back door (see photo below). This is going to take a stacked door and so should be completely open. Builder's will need to fix this one. Also we have high ceilings (which is great), but the wardrobe openings are only standard height, meaning a lot of wasted space.

A few days ago, I got a call from the builder saying that they couldn't hang the front door on the standard aluminium frame, because it weighed 85kgs!!! This is the same weight as me....well most of me! They need to bring in steel to support the door. I hope nobody gets their fingers caught in the door as it closes.

It's all very exciting for us as the kids can now stand in their room (and pretend to sit on the toilet!!!).

Brickies next....

Nothing Like A Fresh Slab

As you can see in the photo above, where there once was trees, snakes, and spiders, there is now a fresh concrete slab. This slab forms the bottom floor of the house, and the top floor will come off it and forward to the line of metal stakes with yellow caps, that you can see at the bottom of the photo.

You might also notice the smoke and haze in the photo...one of our frequent and friendly bushfires was burning close by. I think this summer might be another year of fires.

This shot looks back up the block, and the height of the concrete wall that you can see is about 5 feet tall, or up to my shoulders. Somehow we have to make this area a backyard!

I don't think we will see any action for a week or so now, as the conrete cures. Next up will be the framework, and then the brickwork.