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!)