Handover pics continued

It's Sunday night, about 48 hours after getting our keys. Spent all weekend cleaning and moving in basic items, the place now looks a mess all over again with half-opened boxes, rags & mops everywhere, temporary foldup tables and chairs... but anyway, here's a couple of pics taken at handover on Friday, before all the moving chaos began.

The front door - part of the promotion when we signed on for the house. 1020 x 2340, clear glass, stained Intergrain Charcoal. 750mm Gainsborough pull handle upgrade. Not sure whether we'll keep the clear glass, or add some obsure tint - I quite like the clear glass at the moment. Bricks are Austral Melbourne series Hawthorn with offwhite flush mortar - absolutely love them! That portico light, we'll change to a sensor light... getting all the plain light fittings changed will happen, but it's low on the huge list of things to do.



Entry hallway, and the feature upgrade stairs. Cantilevered hardwood with continuous handrail. and stainless steel balusters. The downside to these stairs is that they look awesome, but you can't really have any under-stair storage due to all the supporting framework under the stairs. Currently in raw finish - we have the stairs guy booked in tomorrow for sanding & staining over 3 days; if he does a good job, we'll put his details up. We will probably need to touch up or repaint the walls surrounding the stairs after staining (as the stain will run onto the walls), so might even change to a feature colour around the stairs - we'll see how much stain bleeding there is and decide after that. Three step lights illuminate the treads and look very very nice! We didn't add in a light over the stairwell, as it wouldn't be very visible from the ground floor. Some designs like the Liberty have the stairwell turning 180 degrees, and I think we would have added a stair light in that case.


Laundry. Got to have one, but will be trying to avoid spending any time in here unless absolutely necessary. We decided to put the taps on the all above the washing machine position, so the taps are easily turned on/off when the machine isn't in use. Usually they're in the cabinet right at the bottom, a bit of a pain to crawl down and turn off. Had plenty of experience with split washing machine hoses that were left on all the time, that end up flooding the laundry and beyond, so turn off your taps when not in use! We also put in a floor waste under the washing machine, just in case. Colours here: floor tiles are Tecnico Charcoal 400x400, wall tiles are Linea Grey 200x300, cabinet is Laminex Polar White with Laminex New Graphite benchtop.

Standing in the family room area, looking towards the kitchen in front and dining to the left. Needs more furniture, and more food, and lots more beer & wine. Ceilings are Dulux White on White, walls are Dulux Natural White. Of course, at night with downlights or fluoros on, everything looks creamier than in daylight.

And finally, we cracked open a bottle of champagne - this was given to us by the real estate agents when we bought the old house back in May 2009, and we'd been saving it for handover day!


We had handover with a missing kitchen drawer handle, and a bloke came around Saturday afternoon to replace it, so that was pretty good. There's a couple of problems that need to be sorted out soon rather than at 90 day maintenance (mainly we can't watch TV because someone forgot to connect the antenna to the Starserve system!), but we're pretty sure John will get in touch with us soonish about them, as he's on our street all the time building our neighbour's Chelsea!

And for all you housebuilders out there - when you do get handover, with shiny new keys in your pocket, driving up to your house with the facade lit up, parking your car in your garage and walking into your house - it makes all the planning, waiting, stressing, moving, mortgage payments all worthwhile!

More handover pics another day!

T&T

Day 139: Plaster installed on INSPECTION DAY... The good, and the bad!

Well, today was the day we had booked in our independent inspector to have a lockup/preplaster inspection - and of course, the best-laid plans are laid to waste by plasterers who decided to start on our house EARLY - thus our "preplaster inspection" is more of a "mid-plaster inspection". I missed a call from Alex (our inspector) this morning - turns out he arrived at our house early, and he started his inspection early because he found the plasterers already sticking up the ceiling and walls!

I didn't make it to the inspection due to work, but Tina met Monique and Alex on site to have a look around. Anyway, let's start with the plaster pics first.

Kitchen/family room area.

Kitchen window splashback, surrounded (mostly) by plaster. Long cornices sitting on the floor.

Dining room with plaster waiting to be installed, home theatre room off to the left.


Bathroom - not "normal" plaster used here, special wet-area sheeting used.

Anyway, back to the inspection. To be honest, quite annoyed at the plaster going up ahead of schedule, as we were very clear that we wanted the inspection done prior to any plaster being put up so that the frame could be inspected as well. However, the plasterers (being third party subcontractors) seem to do what they feel like, and what can we do about that?

Alex picked up on 18 items on his inspection, some easy to fix and trivial, some a little more involved. Anyway, let's do a brief assessment and my layperson's assessment of the seriousness of each.

1) Garage internal access door - gap between the bricks and frame. Easy - timber infill or similar to fix.

2) Some bricks on the garage slab stained from brick cleaners acid. Easy - just need recleaning.

3) Garage boundary brickwork substantially overhanging slab. Medium-Hard - need an engineer to design a rectification solution to support the brickwork.

4) Holes in mortar around the house. Easy -just needs new mortar added.

5) Perpends in alfresco piers over tolerance. Easy (apparently.) Tina says it's a minor cosmetic issue.

6) Timber quads to be installed around afresco beams. Easy -again, a cosmetic issue.

7) Timber infill needed over alfresco door/window. Easy.

8) Powder room window damaged along top edge. Easy (apparently), Monique will get that fixed.

9) Render splatters on brickwork to be cleaned. Easy.

10) Brickwork short of entry frame. Medium - needs door frame adjustment, or infill to match doorframe.

11) Kitchen bulkheads (not load bearing) are in contact with floor joists, need to have a clearance between these two. Medium-Hard -not sure how this can be fixed?

12) Sewer waste pipe (from upstairs toilet) cuts through top of Smart Joist truss - not allowed. Hard? I googled the manufacturers data, and apparently they need a photo and description of the damage to the joist so they can say what needs to be done to fix it. A similar situation was seen with the ensuite shower waste cutting through the joist, and a new beam was fixed adjacent to that, so I suspect a similar fix is needed.

13) Heating ducts are installed through a number of joists, with the holes beyond the maximum size allowed for these joists. Hard? Maybe needs reinforcement of joists where the holes have been cut. Alex only noticed the heating ducts in the family room, but there are a number of other heating ducts through the ground floor which have also been cut through joists, and would need similar rectification. (Of course, to fix all these things the ceiling will have to be pulled off, the rectifications done, and ceiling replastered. Not our fault the plasterers started early!)

14) Tension bracing not adequately fixed to top & bottom plates. Easy - Hard? Monique reckons they're to manufacturers spec, so we'll see what the documentation says.

15) Ply brace in kitchen not nailed in. Easy - just nail in some more nails!

16) Lintels missing over openings in non load-bearing walls (doorways, robes etc). Medium - Hard. Because the plastering is mostly done upstairs, the plaster needs to be removed, lintels installed and replastered. See why the plasterers shouldn't have been booked until the result of our independent inspection?

17) Noggin missing in kitchen wall. Medium. Remove plaster, add noggin, replaster. Sigh... would've been easier... if the plaster wasn't put up early! Spot a trend here?

18) Floor waste to laundry in wrong spot. Medium. Move floor waste, get engineer to approve modification to slab and termite protection is intact. Alex recommends viewing proof all this has been done (eg engineer's report) which is a good idea.

Things weren't all bad though - Alex did state that the brickwork was done to a very high standard, which we're both extremely happy with!

Soooooo... things were going too well I guess to not have some hiccups! On the whole, about half the things Alex picked up were minor and easily fixed. However, the remainder are slightly more complicated, and would be MUCH easier to fix, if the plaster hadn't been installed.

However, the outcome of having this inspection done is that we're going to follow up on the items identified, and ensure that things are made good to standards. I doubt there's ever been a house built that was constructed 110% correct from the outset, and providing that these items are corrected to the relevant standards, we'll be happy still! I reckon there'll be a significant amount of plaster removal and replacement - however that's not our problem!

So, finally a plug for Alex at urbaninspectreport.com.au for doing a thorough job. Stay tuned for followup regarding what happens next. I'll be emailing Alex's report to our construction CSC (I'm not sure who that is this week, it seems to change every month) and will call Monique tomorrow morning to ensure she has a copy of the report, and find out her plans for rectification. Plastering (except cornices) is 99% complete (in one day!) but there's not much point doing any further work until these items are rectified to our satisfaction.

Wish us luck everyone!

T&T

Day 134: Balcony render commenced

Balcony render was started today - didn't see that coming!

However, for the eagle-eyed readers, you might want to take a close look at the bottom of the balcony pillar on the left, and you might spot where a brick was removed about 4 courses from the bottom. So the render has been started, but this brick is missing... wonder when someone will get around to fixing that? Unless, for some strange reason, we're meant to have a brick missing... I guess it won't be too hard or affect the final render for that brick to be replaced before much more rendering is done - but still, would've made sense to fix that before render even started.

Now, the main question still on our minds is - how long from lockup to completion can we expect? Still juggling a few housesitting appointments for the next few months, but we don't want to be housesitting if our house is complete! The MyMetricon website isn't much help, since it's updated pretty slowly and inaccurately - apparently, according to MyMetricon, our roof frame hasn't been started - and the bricks, roof, gutter & fascia also haven't been started. However, to my (admittedly untrained) eye, I reckon we're well past that stage!

For those of you reading who are towards the end of the build process, how long after lockup stage did it take you to get to PCI/handover?

T&T

Day 129: Plumbing, plaster & cornice

Busy on site today - plumbers came in to connect up the downpipes, and a big delivery of plaster & cornices.


They removed the french doors upstairs to load the plaster up there - but fortunately they remembered to put the doors back!


You can see here the bricks have been cleaned everywhere - except for the balcony, which will be rendered. You can also see a couple of downpipes - square profile, in Woodland Grey (to match the gutters), close fitted to the house. We saw another house being built in Nunawading which has huge round downpipes, not fitted close to the house and it looked unattractive, so we're glad our downpipes look good! Though where it connects to the stormwater piping at the bottom of the downpipes is not painted and is quite a long way above ground level, so it stands out in white - maybe someone will come in later to paint that?

Lots of plasterboard (Boral 10mm) and cornice (Scotia) sitting in the kitchen/dining area waiting to be installed. Plaster shouldn't go up for a couple of weeks - I got a call from Monique today saying the carpenters should be back in next week for the balcony, garage roof (and fixing up all the notes marked on the frame?), and our independent inspection has been moved to Monday May 10th, so plaster can't start before then. Plus the insulation needs to be installed first. Where they've put the plaster is right under the massive hole in the roof where all the tiles have been broken, so I'll get some big plastic sheets to put over the plaster to stop it getting soaked when it rains.


Closeup of the cleaned bricks near the front door - love how they look! I think the brickies have done a great job, bricks evenly spaced, mortar widths consistent, good blending!


Finally, the plumbers also had a go at correcting the ensuite shower. We have one showerhead on an adjustable rail on the right (you can just see the plumbing fitting sticking out of the frame), and one showerhead mounted on the ceiling (which was mounted on the wall). It's been moved up to the ceiling - but it's located dead centre of the shower, rather than to one side as drawn on the construction plans. We're thinking this is maybe a good idea, and leaving it as it is?

What do you think - leave the ceiling mounted showerhead in the centre of the shower, or place it to one side? Comment below!

T&T

Day 116 or 117; meter box fixed into position

We didn't go to our house yesterday, but we noticed today that someone had come to fix the meter box, which was hanging loose in the sitting room.


So now the meter box is secured - the meter box positioned was out by just a few inches when the slab was poured, but the fix is pretty easy. You can see the big orange conduit coming from the bottom of the meter box, going into a pipe which runs into and under the slab out to the underground power pit on the footpath. The yellow pipe is a gas line up to the heater in the roof space, and all the white wires are for 240V power to the house. And if you look hard through the very dirty horizontal feature window, you can see our neighbour's lovely (and by lovely I mean awful) brick wall, as they've got not one, but two garage walls on our western boundary. Going to have to cover up that horrible view, probably with bamboo screeners and something green and leafy. Haven't thought about landscaping yet - got months to get into that!

We did our usual Sunday afternoon drive to check out other builds in the area; this photo below is of an extended Laguna that had their slab laid a week before ours, but seems to be going a little slower than us now.


The bricks they're using is also Austral Melbourne series, but Cotham with flush off-white mortar. I think it's a light brown crossed with orange, but it's hard to describe - I think it looks pretty good in real life, but Tina isn't a fan of it.

One thing about the Hawthorn series of bricks is that there's quite a bit of colour variation, in particular tiny black specks that you can't see unless you're a few inches from the brick, and more obvious large dark spots on bricks that you can see in the photo above. Not everyone likes variation in bricks, and there's plenty of bricks created for almost 100% uniformity, but we like the variation and contrast. The owner of this house chose black (monument) for their windows, which reflects the black variations in the bricks. Now the other interesting thing about black is that Metricon don't recommend dark exterior colours - probably because our climate can be pretty scorching, and the darker colours would absorb more heat and then have more potential problems due to warping etc. Anyway, we also chose some dark exterior colours (as have thousands of others building new houses), and hope it won't be an issue!

T&T

Day 112: Bricks cleaned - first floor

Got to the site about noon today to check out the brick cleaners working up on the first floor.


Pretty messy & noisy job, with two trucks out the front pumping the acid wash up to the cleaners, who were in full protective gear.. well, except for the unlucky bloke on the scaffolding :)


Metal capping to the first floor brickwork also installed in preparation for weatherboard cladding. You can also see the difference between clean and uncleaned bricks. The cladding was delivered in the afternoon, so hopefully it'll be installed sometime this week. Looking at the top of the balcony, seems to be missing a row of header bricks at the moment... also the torn weather wrap needs a little closure.

Finally, the bathroom bathtub has been delivered, as well as a few other little goodies - in particular the Gainsborough 750mm double pull handle for the front door! Love this upgrade, it'll look brilliant when installed!

T&T

Day 107: Is our brickwork... finished?

Looks like the bricking stage of lockup is pretty much done - the brickies have taken away their cement mixers and sandwich makers from the site, but left behind their handiwork for us to inspect!


Above: The balcony has had another layer of bricks added to it. Brick sill to the facade window on the right also visible.


All the brick sills have been installed on the ground and first floors. As you can see above, plenty of mortar and dirt all over our entry doorframe! As long as everything is cleaned off properly before staining, the frame should come up just fine. A little worried about the glass - will have to check very carefully at handover that nothing is scratched!



Garage has had the brickwork over the entry all completed too. Don't thnk there's much left to be done for bricking!

Seems the next thing to happen outside should be installation of the cladding to the first floor front & rear, then eaves. We don't really expect much to be done tomorrow, as our anticipated completion of bricking (according to My Metricon) was April 12, 4 days away. We're not sure if completing the garage roof and electrical wiring is part of lockup? Guess we'll find out!

T&T

Day 106: Bricklayers back at work, and daylight savings sucks!

I always get confused when it comes for daylight savings time to change... putting clocks back, forward - all it means to us is that now when we get to our house around 6-6:30, it's already pitch black!

Still, there was just enough light to make out that the brickies had been hard at work again today, despite the odd rain showers that came through.

In this pic above, it looks like the balcony has been all bricked in. This will be rendered; and of course the chippies have to come back to put in the balcony floor.


This shows the west facing first floor wall which has been just about finished; the first window along is the ensuite window over the bath, the next window is for Bed 2. At the front of this wall (left of photo) you can see the weather wrap, which will be covered by weatherboard cladding covering the facade.


Finally, this is looking at the rear of the first floor. The brickwork ends just at the Bed 3 window, and then across this wall will be weatherboard cladding to match the front. Great!

Tina got a call from our SS's boss today - turns out she's been on holidays the last week or two which is why she hasn't called. Regardless, there's been plenty of progress just about every day, very well organised, and we think it was good customer service on behalf of Metricon to contact us on Monique's behalf. Let's hope the good run continues!

T&T

Day 105: East side bricks completed, bath frames installed

The final day of a 5 day Easter weekend - ahh, what a relaxing time! A little bit of chocolate, and lots of hot cross buns smothered in buttter & jam, yum!

Went to our house around lunchtime to find our hardworking brickies just finishing up the east side wall (left side of house in this photo).


They've now completed half of the upstairs bricking, as the front & rear of the first floor is weatherboard cladding. They've also put in the brick windowsills under these windows on the east side.


Going inside, the carpenters were back sometime today to construct the bathtub frames in the bathroom and ensuite. The ensuite bath is a lot bigger than I thought it would be!

So, weather-permitting, hoping to have the west side bricking done by end of the week. There's all the remaining windowsills on the ground floor to complete and the brickwork over the garage door opening for the brickies to do. Still, things are looking on track for lockup to be complete by end of the month - woohoo!

T&T

Day 100: Tragedy!#@$$!!@!!!

Erm... well, not really :) April fools day, right? Also Day 100 of the build. Lots of pictures in this blog post!

I was all set to go home without visiting the site, as I thought there wouldn't have been anything done - I mean, it's the day before the Easter long weekend, what self-respecting tradie would bother working on a day like today? But when I checked in with Tina, she was all excited..
"I'm up on the scaffolding... there's been heaps of work done!" - well of course I had to see what the fuss was about!

Today's Work #1: Brickies on site early, again! They weren't meant to be back until after Easter, but they were hard at it today! The balcony is starting to take shape, with the lintels all installed and a few courses of bricks put up. Also, the west side ground floor bricking has been completed, though it's hard to get a look with the scaffolding in the way.


Plus the rear bipart door and home theatre window bricking over has been done too. Ground floor bricking, all done!


Today's Work #2: First floor has been wrapped all the way around. We're now pretty well protected from the elements! See first picture.

Today's Work #3: The heating unit has been installed, and a whole bunch of heating ducts have been run through the roof and through to the ground floor! No idea how they managed to get such a huge unit in the house and up into the roof cavity.


Next picture shows another view of the gas unit sitting on some wood in the roof cavity, and a bunch more pipes. Very interesting in how the pipes are run through spaces in the frame to get to the ground floor!


Today's Work #4: Chippies have been through the house, planing the studs and adding packing - this is to make sure the stud walls are as vertical as possible so that the plaster goes on straight. No pics of this today (maybe tomorrow)!

Today's Work #5: This may have been a few days ago, but when we were up on the top level of scaffolding checking out the solar panel, we also saw our aerial perched at the very apex of the roof. Nice! And looking to the right, you can see the solar panel that has been installed up on the roof, connecting to the hot water service, also installed in the last few days.


It's incredible seeing the amount of work being done in just one day - good organisation by our SS! She didn't call us this week; probably because she was too busy calling tradies in, and that's fine by us! Hopefully the first floor bricking and cladding will be complete in the next few weeks; though there's quite a bit of work for the garage to be done (putting up the garage roof, trusses and tiling). Hoping to be at lockup stage by the end of April, and maybe we'll dare to ask our SS when she reckons everything will be complete!

Happy Easter everyone!

T&T

Day 98: Scaffolding erected, auction results from the weekend.

Yesterday someone came to clean out the rubbish cage, but today I turned up around noon just in time to catch the crew who had put up the scaffolding this morning; apparently it took them about 3 hours.

Makes it a bit harder to get into the house now! Not sure if much else will be done this week, we'll see how it goes. Also went by Balwyn to pick up the keys for a 3 month housesit there, we'll move in this Good Friday.

We also had a busy weekend, following a bunch of auctions in our area that were of interest! One of Melbourne's busiest auction weekends ever with over 1000 auctions. First one was the Metricon Liberty in Mont Albert North, on Whitehorse Rd.


Not a big turnout, maybe 20 people and passed in at $1.6m, but later had a sold sign up, final price undisclosed, but probably between $1.6 to $1.7m.


Next was a neighbour's house about 7 houses up the street. This is a 40sq AV Jennings house on a big block of land built about 3 years ago. Had a nice modern floorplan, with a great double storey void over the formal rooms and massive 2nd/3rd bedrooms. We love the facade on this house, was one of the things that attracted us to this street, and also played a part in us choosing the Chateau design with weatherboard cladding on the first floor, like this house. Sold after auction for over $1.25m.

Finally, this tired old weatherboard on 750m a few streets away from us, on a busier road, facing east/west. Sold for $890,500! We'll probably see 2 - 3 townhouses there by the end of next year. Pretty glad we bought our redevelopment house when we did - if we bought it today, we'd be paying another $150-200k for it!

T&T

Day 94: Steel lintels for balcony & garage installed

Happy Friday everybody! Not much done on our house today, just the steel lintels (beams) installed.

It looks like the beams are just placed on top of the supporting structures, then held in place by mortar and the interlocking brickwork around it? I couldn't see any holes for bolts or anything else. Hopefully the brickies will be back next week to finish off the ground floor before Easter.

It was raining quite a bit when I got to the house in the late afternoon, and with the wide eaves the top floor was bone dry - yay! Unless there's some severe wind/rainy weather coming, I think our frame and flooring is safe from rain, even without the first floor bricks.

Tomorrow, got a busy day of house inspections and auctions to check out in our local area (we're keeping a very keen eye on our local property market of course), but the one that will interest everyone else building with Metricon is this Wingrove 28 that Tina found on Domain.


This one was in the same development as the Tribeca that went to auction about a month ago - we think the result for that house was approx $1.15m sold after auction. This one is quite a bit smaller at 28 squares, and since there isn't a display home with this floorplan available, it'll be interesting to see how it feels on the inside! The above picture shows the Contemporary facade fully rendered. Nice modern colours on the facade, exposed aggregate driveway.

This picture shows a kitchen island bench with a bend in it, like the Tribeca's kitchen. two big pot drawers either side of the oven and a couple of windows either side of the cooktop. The floor tiles are quite nice, but beware of a dark colour across such a large area - makes things feel smaller. Also the light grout will discolour and get dirty over time. I'm not sure of the light beech colour laminate kitchen doors though- a little bit 80s there!

Anyway, if you'd like to have a look at this Metricon Wingrove (and buy it?), click here for the link to Domain. It's open tomorrow at 11am.

However we won't be at that Wingrove tomorrow, because at the same time (11am) there's this Metricon Liberty in Mont Albert going for auction which we visited a couple of months ago, and we want to see what the action is like. Asking $1.5m to $1.7m.

T&T

Day 93: One week of bricking, not much left for ground floor to be completed

Our brickies started last Thursday, and it's pretty impressive to see what the team have managed to do in a week!

From the front, the portico now sprouts two big brick pillars, plus the "rear" pillars for the balcony were completed. These pillars and the balcony will be all rendered.


Also a more work on the garage was done; the side wall is pretty much complete, the brick piers are all in, and the rear bricking for the roller door was done as well.

Need to get the chippies back to erect the garage roof, then the people for the gutter/fascia, and then the tilers!

For the ground floor bricking to be complete, we need the rear bricking over the bipart door and home theatre window finished off, plus a bit more bricking on the west side. Hoping it'll all be done by tomorrow afternoon!

T&T

Day 92: Garage wall bricking commenced

Some more work by our brickies today; starting on the garage wall adjacent to the fenceline was the most noticable thing today. It's about halfway done - it should reach almost to the neighbour's eaves when this wall is done.

This is a freestanding brick wall - no timber frame to tie onto. You can see 3 brick pillars/piers along this wall. In-between each pillar, there's just a single brick wall, with the "nice" side facing out... towards the fence. Anyway, I'm planning to add in built-in garage shelving in these niches, so it's not a big deal. Each brick has 2-3 "nice" sides, and one crappy side, which is normally hidden by facing inwards towards the timber frame, or in this case with our garage wall, in towards the garage. On the other side of the garage, the "nice" side of the bricks are facing towards the garage.

After this wall is done, we have to decide whether to replace the paling fence there (we had 4 sections of fence removed, but 2 sections were destroyed in the great site scrape of mid January 2010) or simply leave an exposed brick wall to our neighbours. I'm inclined to put all the fence back/get the missing sections remade, as that's what we promised the landlord of the neighbouring property, but we can decide on this later.



More brickwork was done around the west side of the house, with the dining room window (pictured above) bricked over. You can also see the outdoor room pillar has been complete, which is great - there was only a single timber pole holding up this corner of the house before, and with the added weight of roof tiles, we're feeling much more secure now there's a brick pillar supporting the roof! The exposed beams in the outdoor room will also get painted in Surfmist to match the fascia.

The weather forecast is looking good (fingers crossed still!) for the remaining days in the week, some fog tomorrow and minor showers on Friday - so we're hoping to have the ground floor bricking complete by Friday! What remains to be done for the ground floor is the garage brick walls and piers, and to complete the west side bricking.

T&T

Day 91: Ground floor, east side bricking completed

Turned up around 3:30 today, and found the brickies going hard at it. Apparently the team of 5 come from Rye every day! Bought them some beers to celebrate finishing up at the end of the day which was much appreciated.


Today there was more bricking at the front, over the front door, and up underneath where the balcony will be. Not quite sure how they're going to build the balcony there, but after all the bricking is done, the balcony will be rendered.



The east side ground floor was completed today too, with the bricks at the home theatre room wall nicely tucked up the ground floor fascia. Also some more bricking done on the west side, including installation of lintel over the kitchen window splashback, and a bit of bricking at the rear around the bipart doors.


Also got a message on my voicemail from our SS. She mentioned that we were lucky enough to get the brickies in a few days early, which means the ground floor should be bricked up by the end of this week, and scaffolding should go up next week. Brickies probably wouldn't be back until after the Easter long weekend, so it means there won't be much happening next week.

T&T

Day 90: Bricking continues

Today, some more work done on the east side of the house (garage side), I think they've bricked up as high as they can go without proper scaffolding. Plus the first floor needs to be wrapped before any more bricks can go up on that side.



They've also bricked up & over the study and family room windows, with steel lintels installed to hold the weight of bricks over the windows.


This picture shows the colour difference between freshly laid mortar and dried mortar. The bricks at the top were laid today and the mortar is still a little wet, and very dark. The bricks that were laid 4 days ago has the mortar drying out nicely, showing the off-white colour; we reckon they look awesome against the dark Hawthorn bricks! We were a bit concerned when they were first laid because the mortar was so dark, but it's come up a treat now! From what we can tell, the brickwork is being done nicely, with consistent mortar width and everything lining up nicely!


Up on the first floor in the leisure area, we can see about 2 courses of bricks above the existing level of the weather wrapping. When the scaffolding comes back for the first floor, they should wrap the first floor and then continue bricking.

And finally, I messed about a little with Photoshop and came up with this composite image made up of 5 photos in the open plan area. From left to right: Family room, home theatre room, dining room (with bipart door) and then kitchen with window splashback, and on far right the fridge alcove/walk in pantry. Will have to try this again, but using a tripod to take more even photos so the joins are less visible.

Pray for good weather to continue, we're hoping to have the ground floor bricking finished this week!

T&T